Rats!

[nicaland]

Rats! Actually mice. They are getting into the a/c system on my 1998 Xplorer 230XLW (Dodge B3500 chassis). No smells or poop yet, thank God, but I figure that it's just a matter of time. Right now the evidence of their being in the system is tiny bits of toilet paper that they are shredding off of the roll in the bathroom ( I can't figure out how they are getting in there either!) that blow out of the A/C vents when I turn the fan on. I thought I had solved the problem by placing a screen over the return air intake up in the passenger footwell, but they are still getting in somewhere. Any ideas/sugestions?

[jrobe]

We have a relatively new home and occasionally were getting mice in the basement. There is no entry point that I could ever find. They are obviously smarter than me. Besides the usual measures (no food in the van, sealing all holes, moth balls, etc.), I finally made some small square cages with chicken wire and keep them filled with bars of mouse poison all around my house. When I refill them I find dead mice laying all around the house. We haven't had a mouse problem for many years now since I started doing this. Wiping out the population around the house as best I could solved most of our problem when nothing else would.

[MsNomer]

Last thing he needs is dead mice in the AC.

[Davydd]

Ive found those plug in to !20vac outlets high frequency sound emitters that you can't hear but rodents can to be effective. I've got one plugged inside my van and also inside the garage. It doesn't disturb my cat. I also use traditional mouse traps with a dab of peanut butter not poison that will allow the mouse to get somewhere you can't get to but maybe eventually smell. It is said a mouse can get through a 1/8" crack. If I trap a mouse I toss it in the woods where other animals can feed on it. That's life in the wild.

[TomF]

I had the same issue a few years ago. Over the winter, mice had built a huge nest in the A/C plenum. I didn't know this until I first turned the unit on in the spring. Some tufts of stuff blew out of the vents, and the blower died. I ended up digging out the nest and replacing the blower, but mice nest stuff had gotten into the evaporator fins, so the airflow was almost nil. I tried various heavy duty cleaners and high pressure water to flush out the evaporator. Finally, after two seasons of this, I have managed to restore some air flow.
Now, when I store the RV for the winter, i spread those herbal packets of mouse deterrent around, especially near the A/C box.
This is the Dodge B3500 van body. The mice had chewed part of the air control door at the foot well to get into the plenum.

[howard beale]

Like an idiot, I left some dog food in my rig and found a mouse came through engine bay into drivers side footwell for snacks and security. (think I found out w/in a day or so). UGH!! I covered the entry hole, had to rewrap 2 wires which were gnawed at but not chewed through. I sprayed peppermint oil all over engine bay. No more mices. apparently peppermint and lavender are deterrents. Good luck.

[swadia]

We had mice in our TT. As another poster said, we used the hi-frequency do-dads to keep them out. The units really work, but the sound does not go through walls, so we had one at each end of the TT.
We also use a different brand in our house. Those have a blue night light included on them.
Nothing is worse than hearing chomp, chomp at night.��

[AG_Ltd]

I had rodents in my Cedar Creek 5th wheel but now have none. This is how:

I TRIED EVERYTHING... be it Irish Spring soap bars, dryer sheets, ultra-sonic electronic thinga-ma-jigs, "Fresh Cab", LED rope lights... you name it, I tried it but nothing worked for me except this.

(By the way, I could have used the "quick and easy" rodent poisons but these will also kill innocent birds of prey (owls, hawks etc, anything that might eat a sick rodent) I could not live with that, so I had to figure out a way to get rid of rodents withOUT using poison.)

I successfully used old fashioned mouse/rat traps to remove them from of my rig (peanut butter with a chocolate chip works great). Once I killed them all, I had to figure out a way to keep them from re-entering.

So I crawled under my rig and stuffed a rust-proof steel wool-like product called "XCluder" into every possible hole. Yes, everything dime-sized or bigger.

This did the trick. No more mice!

Good luck!

https://buyxcluder.com/

[Davydd]

I trapped 21 mice with old fashion mouse traps with peanut butter in my vintage 1971 Airstream trail one winter. Sooner or later you exhaust the surrounding mouse supply.

[nicaland]

Back to my original post where I had asked if anyone knew how mice were getting into my AC venting from inside the RV (Dodge B3500 chassis) after I had screened off the return air intake, I have finally figured out how they have been doing so, which is that they were still able to get into the system by entering via the heater ducts, which I have also now screened off with a 1/8" mesh steel screening. After reading some of the comments both here and online that describe the mess and difficulty of cleaning up nests that were made in the plenum via the fresh air intake under the hood, I feel lucky that this has yet to happen in my case, as all of the paper debris they were bringing in was deposited on the outlet side of the heating/cooling coils and blowing out the vents upon startup. Unfortunately due to space restrictions I can't see how I can use the same screening on the underhood fesh air intake without a lot of troublesome disassembly, so I have used a trick that I used for years in Nicaragua , disolving finely ground Cayenne pepper in water and painting the mixture all over under the hood. I first used only powdered Cayenne but it was being sucked up by the fresh air intake, resulting in a fire drill like escape from the interior on engine startup!

A few of the posts here mention success with ultrasound devices, which I had been under the impression that they did not work very well. For those of you that have had success with these, could you please provide which manufacturer/model you are using? I would like to try installing one underhood near the fresh air intake and one in the interior as well. I have been using sticky traps in the interior with considerable success, but only use them when I can check on a daily basis if they caught a mouse to avoid stinking the place up.