Rat chewed through wiring, Cayenne pepper or Mint?

Note- do NOT install this over your cabin fresh air intake.

 

I vote Cayenne Pepper.

I think rats would taste horrible with Mint.

 

Neither Pure peppermint extract, nor pepper of any kind will deter mice, rats or squirrels. I've been down this road. Where I live, everyone has been down this road. The electronic rodent repellers are also unreliable. Yes, even the hundred dollar ultrasonic ones with flashing strobes that hard wire to your vehicle battery. No dice. Mice will nest on top of them and eat the very wires that feed them.

Pick your poison so to speak, but you will have to kill them. The method is up to you.

 

D-Con

Rodents love it

 

I prefer traps over poison. Helps prevent secondary deaths of other animals that may eat the poisoned rodents.

 

I've read enough online to find people have great success with both peppermint and cayenne, and then your response which can be confusing! I do understand though, I will try a multitude of methods to hopefully prevent this from happening again.

 

As mentioned, I've been down this road more than once, but I'll give you a 'for instance.'

In one of my earlier (of what would be many) encounters with vermin, I removed a mouse nest from the cabin filter of my wife's Camry. Google told me to use cayenne or peppermint oil. I used both, covering the area with ground cayenne and soaking half a dish sponge in pure peppermint extract. In 48 hours the mice had returned, rebuilding the nest on top of the ground cayenne pepper and immediately adjacent the freshly soaked sponge.
I shit you not.

I imagine many who believe these products to have worked for them just did't have the population we do, and the critters simply moved on leaving folks with a sense of success they might not have had under a different set of circumstances.

Good luck with it. $400 bucks is a drop in the bucket compared to the damage these things are capable of.

 

I've been the biggest proponent of ground cayenne on this forum and I'll tell ya why. I live in the woods and have tons of chipmunks, rats, and mice. There is a never ending supply of them here and they don't "move on" lol.

Wife and I parked our cars outside for 20 years and always had some kind of nesting or chewing going on under the hoods. I cleaned it out and went on as I never had damage that needed to be addressed--mainly chewed firewall insulation, acorns in the engine bay and even a mouse popping its head out at the windshield when out and about when the engine heated up pretty well.

When I got my Taco the wife came into the house one day and said she saw a chipmunk on my tire going up into the engine bay. I went out and the black firewall insulation had been chewed. I mixed up some water and cayenne and brushed all the insulation with it and that was the end of the chewing.

A few years ago the wife heard something go thru her belts, got out and snakes were lying on the ground. When I got home I popped the hood and found heaps of acorns on the engine. Baby snakes after rodents went thru the belts. I cleaned it out and washed the engine with purple degreaser. The NEXT day--less than 12hrs later I found the pic below.

We were going on a trip and I didn't address it until I got home. I had heard that NY city used capsaisin impregnated wire insulation to keep rats from chewing and I thought I'd try my hand at mixing pepper spray. Cut up a pint of habaneros and soaked them in alcohol for several days. When it had turned orange I strained it and poured in in a spray bottle. Sprayed the engines liberally--and gagged my ass off doing so. Holy crap that stuff was potent.

Didn't do a damned thing to deter my rodents and I was still getting acorns.

Soooo...I bought a big container of ground cayenne and sprinkled the engine bays. That was it--no more rodents, no more acorns in the engine bays however they still got on top of the cabin air filter of my wife's Hyundai in spite of my cayenne and I ended up buying the green universal HVAC filter material and cut my own frequently.

About 4 months after I stopped getting any rodent activity under the hoods--I was keeping the cayenne fresh under there, my wife's car started running rough. ABSOLUTELY NO acorns or signs of nesting but chewed injector wires. Had it fixed at the dealer and then sprayed all the wires with Fluid Film. No damage since then and it's been a couple years or so.

TLDR--spray your wiring with Fluid Film and keep cayenne pepper sprinkled in the engine bay if you live in rodent infested areas. You can't kill them all.

 

I've had success with spraying everything down with PineSol (actually the cheap generic version from the dollar store). Dumped the remainder of the bottle on the ground under the truck too. No more critter chewing thru my fuel line.

 

Man those acorn piles are a familiar sight. Depending on the vehicle, I have found them in many places. Usually quite clean and neat, and often in the airbox. Never had the branches, though. In fact I'm certain in at least a couple cases the intruders actually cleaned the area before bringing in their stores.

The one place that they never leave neat is their party spot on top of the intake manifold. Always looks like NOLA after Mardi Gras.

Unsurprisingly, every method won't work under every circumstance. I have only found success in the past couple years with active and aggressive vermin genocide.

I have plenty of Fluid Film on hand but have never experimented with it as a rodent deterrent.

 

Crazy thing about that pile was that I cleaned that engine at 6:30 PM and it looked like that at 5:30 AM the next morning. That pile is deep too--~4". Insane, had to be chipmunks. I remodeled my house and extended my garage recently so we park inside now and I hope my rodent problems are over. I got the idea of Fluid Film from some yankees who say they have never had rodent problems on their trucks where everything is coated in the stuff.

 

Mmmmmmm.....vermin must hate the taste of lanolin in FF.

 

I bought one of those too because mice were eating the Irish Spring soap and dryer sheets I put out, total waste of money and time.

 

It’s funny to me with all of the technology man has created that cockroaches, mice, rats, etc. are still a pain in the ass to eliminate. Sometimes the old school methods like ‘walk the plank’ for mice are still the best.

Lots of farmers tricks out there. One of my favorites is for gopher elimination. When you feel the need to take a pee go outside and pee into the gopher hole. Supposedly this will get rid off them.

 

I think I caught like 5 in regular traps and glue traps over a year. I had 5 in this in the first week. I was getting 3-5 a week pretty regularly. I lost count of how many I caught but it slowed down after a while and I haven’t had any for quite some time now

 

Yeah, but then you have cats

 

I had a bunch in the garage now thankfully havent had one in months!

 

Coyote urine .