A catastrophic series of events led to the complete failure of this chilled water plant in the middle of the cooling season and we had to hustle to develop a plan and then do the work to restore cooling. Our first impression when we arrived for our initial assessment was that this chiller plant had seen better days—the condensing units were 20 years old, all of the pipe insulation was brittle and cracked, the refrigerant piping was resting on the concrete pad, and both units were filled with mice! It was clear that these units had not been maintained in a while and the mice had moved in and decided to stay!
Behind closed doors, we jokingly refer to our rodent friends as “service mice” as they are so profoundly destructive to control wiring and control boards on outside equipment. If there is a good acorn season, then the rodents are busy in their forest homes during the winter as there is lots to eat. If there is a bad acorn season, then the rodents invade outside condensers and heat pumps looking for food and protection from the elements.
Invariably, they chew up control wires and insulation and destroy control boards—they certainly create a lot of service work for our service department in the spring when cooling systems are turned on. And many thanks to the genius that decided to develop corn-based insulation for wires! Our service mice are overjoyed to spend the winter in a warm heat pump surrounded by yummy wires! If they are lucky, only a few of them will get electrocuted and whatever damage they do won’t be noticed until the spring.
We use a lot of moth balls to deter the mice but we do have some customers that are horrified that we would put “cancer causing chemicals” in their equipment! They don’t believe us when we say the moth balls are the “free range organic kind” (ha!)—but they often come to their senses when we inform them that all of their neighbors have moth balls in their outside units so, most assuredly, all of the neighborhood mice will be spending the winter in any outside unit with no moth balls.
Kicking Out the Service Mice and Repairing The Damage