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There’s a moose loose aboot this hoose

Well, actually more than one!. In a half-hearted go at replacing and re-designing my en-suite I prepared the way by lifting the flooring and doing all the necessary demolition work. As you do at my age, you quickly loose interest, so the scene of devastation sat for a week before I summoned the get-go to finish things off. In between time it became obvious that we had suffered the intrusion of a horde of unwanted house guests. It soon became apparent that they had somehow got into the voids below the suspended floor and took it as invitation to join us in the rooms above when I lifted sections of said floor. Can’t say I blame them given the current weather but whilst I might seem flippant, my good lady is, to say the least, beyond distressed. 

So the floor is down again but that has trapped the wee buggers in our living spaces. I have spent much time setting traps and dispatching the victims one by one. Why am I telling you this? Well I built this house way back in 1990 and as a relatively young, go-ahead electrical contractor I installed cabling for just about every conceivable system from fire alarms to whole house music systems. Back then I never thought one jot about rodent intrusion. If I had to do it again there would be no voids unless totally unavoidable. There would be no hidden routes to get between floor levels or rooms yet this was something I deliberately did to facilitate future service installation. If  I had to do it again whether reasonable or not the designer would declare an external influence code of AL2!
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  • We had one case where a rodent infestation was causing repeated callbacks ... kitchen/small lobby and downstairs bath only, flat roofed extension. The rats (definitely rats) were getting in through unknown entry points (I suspect missing bricks below ground level allowing access to the cavity). Anyhow the little buggers were stripping the T&E repeatedly... the poor lady had to have the entire ceiling taken down 3 times to clear out the damage and replace the cabling. The 3rd time, we replaced it with MI cable. Seems like massive overkill, but the beasts weren't actually causing any other problems!


    We built custom metal enclosures round the downlights, with the MI entering through a 20mm hole with gland, and then made off into the 'pot' a bit further on, which could then be connected to the flex of the LED dax lights.


    Hell of a complex way to go, and it cost the lady 3x the cost of doing T&E. But 2 yrs later and no callbacks

    Edit: the connection to the (unmolested) T&E in the main house was done with an adaptable metal box on the original external wall, in the new roofspace for the flat extension. they'd left us about 4" of undamaged cable to work with, which was plenty.
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  • We had one case where a rodent infestation was causing repeated callbacks ... kitchen/small lobby and downstairs bath only, flat roofed extension. The rats (definitely rats) were getting in through unknown entry points (I suspect missing bricks below ground level allowing access to the cavity). Anyhow the little buggers were stripping the T&E repeatedly... the poor lady had to have the entire ceiling taken down 3 times to clear out the damage and replace the cabling. The 3rd time, we replaced it with MI cable. Seems like massive overkill, but the beasts weren't actually causing any other problems!


    We built custom metal enclosures round the downlights, with the MI entering through a 20mm hole with gland, and then made off into the 'pot' a bit further on, which could then be connected to the flex of the LED dax lights.


    Hell of a complex way to go, and it cost the lady 3x the cost of doing T&E. But 2 yrs later and no callbacks

    Edit: the connection to the (unmolested) T&E in the main house was done with an adaptable metal box on the original external wall, in the new roofspace for the flat extension. they'd left us about 4" of undamaged cable to work with, which was plenty.
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