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Welcome to another episode of Peskies Pest Control podcast here in Birmingham Alabama with Michael and Travis. We do this podcast as a community service for Birmingham, Hoover, Vestavia Hills, Mountain Brook, Helena, Alabaster, Pelham and all other surrounding areas!
Michael Wienecke:
Hey, so today we want to talk about entry points in a house, particular dryer vents. We see a lot of bent up dryer vents, broken dryer vents, no dryer vent. And what can get into that dryer vent? Snakes, rats, mice, squirrels, chipmunks, birds, anything that can fit their head into a dryer vent can get in there. So we’ve got a good picture that we want to show and kind of talk about what to look for and some ways to fix it to keep that critter out. So here we’ve got a dryer vent on the side of a house. You can see that there’s a lot black right there. So that’s an indication that something has crawled up that wall and gotten into that dryer vent. This particular customer did have a rat getting in through the dryer vent, chewed a hole through the duct of the dryer vent and was getting into the house. Multiple rats were getting into the house. That’s a very large rub mark. So once again, pretty easy find. We got in there, got it patched up, put a brand new dryer vent on there, got it fixed.
Travis McGowin:
Yeah, this is a very significant amount of activity inside of this house or going on from the outside and getting into the inside of this house. And this is definitely not our first rodeo, so to speak, in seeing something like this. I actually had a customer several months back that had the same problem. They didn’t even have a dryer vent cover at all. There was just this big hole there where the dryer vent should have been and it was not there. And she had called three or four other companies to come out, take a look. Nobody could find where the rats were getting in at. She had rats running in and around her house. In the broad daylight, they were sitting in their living room and had rats in broad daylight show up. And within about 15 minutes, I pulled the dryer back and I found the chewed up, like you said, chewed up dryer vent hose. All types of just nastiness under the dryer and the washing machine. And then go, of course, to find out that not even the same as this case, there was no dryer vent cover at all. So this is definitely a very typical and common rodent point of entry into a customer’s house.
Michael Wienecke:
Yeah. And another thing I’ll say about that particular dryer vent and a lot of them we see, you see that hardy board, which is overlapping. There’s a gap between the underside of that dryer vent. So even replacing it with a new one, I would recommend for this application or a brick or a cinder block where you can have that void around the outside using more of a cage style dryer vent. I’m not really a fan of this vent anyway, because as you can see that that little flap that’s supposed to open and close is now stuck open because all the lint has just built up around the sides and it just makes it a large entry point. Like I said, a bird could fly in there, start creating a nest. Then you’re going to have potential house fire issues. Your clothes aren’t going to be getting dry. Just all kinds of problems with that.
