We all know how annoying rodents can be when they enter our homes. They scurry up our walls and over our heads at night, raid our food and ruin it with their feces, and breed wildly, creating more and more inhabitants to worry about. Rats, mice, and squirrels also do a lot of damage to your home’s structure, insulation, plumbing, and even electrical wiring.
That’s where the biggest problem comes into play. While you can repair obvious damage, it’s all too easy to overlook a gnawed piece of wire when you’re dealing with larger-scale problems like insulation used as nests, excrement-contaminated floorboards, and gnawed support beams. However, a stray frayed cord can cause more damage than all other problems: it can start an electrical fire in your home.
Why do they chew wires?
Considering that at least one rodent has to have died biting into an electrical wire, it doesn’t make much sense that they would have taken it. So why do rodents chew on wires? The answer is simple: rodents chew all. Rodents’ teeth are constantly growing, which forces them to have to bite everything their paws can put down to file their teeth. If they don’t bite often, their teeth can grow so long that they can no longer feed themselves and they will starve.
So electrical cables suffer the tragedy of being chewed simply because they are there. Rats, squirrels, and mice will chew through anything, even metal pipes, so the soft insulating exterior of electrical wires is an appetizing treat in comparison.
How fires start
The plastic insulation that surrounds electrical wiring exists because electricity is quite hot when it passes through the wires. Insulation protects nearby objects from overheating. However, when a rat or other rodent has been chasing your wires, they leave nothing behind but hot, exposed metal. From there, it’s only a matter of time before the wire shorts out causing a spark, or heats up causing something nearby to ignite. Usually, household insulation or other debris stirred up by rodents is what ignites the fire, but sometimes it may just be that the wire is resting against a wooden support.
Rodent-Related Home Fire Prevention
Experts believe that nearly a quarter of fires with unknown causes are caused by rodent damage.
The easiest way to prevent rodent-related home fires is to prevent rodents from entering your home in the first place. Because mice can get into holes as small as 1/4 inch, you should call a wildlife exclusion team to make sure rodents can’t get into your home. These kits can find and seal any problem areas to keep your home free of rodents.
If you already have rodents, you should call a professional pest control team right away. You may already have significant damage to your home from rodent squatters, so once you’ve removed them from your home, ask your pest control team about ways to check for and repair damage created by rodents. rodents.
As always, install and frequently test a smoke detector in your home, whether or not you have rodents. If a fire occurs, a smoke detector can save your life and the lives of your family.