Guru
Joined: 26/09/2020
Location: AustraliaPosts: 712
| Posted: 06:46am 01 Oct 2025 |
I did my trade as a sparkie. I did domestic wiring stuff for a few years. Many times I came across wiring where the sheathing and insulation was chewed off the cables in roof spaces. Sometimes there were up to 2 metres of bare wires still clipped to the rafters and still live.
I fixed one light in a lounge room once, where the rats had actually eaten the insulation and also eaten through the copper neutral wire.
It was a clip lock roof, so I had to pull sheets of roofing off, rewire the light and put the roof back on.
A week later I was called back because the light stopped working.
Same thing the rats ate the neutral and the insulation again.
This time I used conduit to enclose the cable and ran it in a different route.
The rats seemed to have decide that the eaves were their own space and any cables in that space were to be got rid of.
That was many years ago now, so moving the wiring to a different route worked.
Another friend wanted his house rewired.
He had a massive rat problem so he got me to wire the place with conduit on the underside of the ceiling.
It looked very industrial but he did not have any cables chewed after the rewire.
For our own house I have cut pieces of sheet metal to fit in corrugations of the roofing and screwed them to the fascia board and ridge cap.
There is only a few mm at most now where any rodent can get into the roof. Our house has a cathedral ceiling so any wiring repairs require the roof to be taken off. I don't want to keep doing that. So metal profiles cut to suit the roof have worked so far.