So, when we left off the Camper Saga last October, I promised a “whole ’nother story,” and here it is.
We’re in Virginia, having camped our way up the coast. We had yet to experience the great Camper Saga; that was on the way back. As I said in the Camper Saga, it was tough setting up and tearing down the very next day on the way, but having only used the camper three or four times, it was a good training exercise. And we only ran the AC at night, for maybe eight to ten hours. Now we’re on the swampy coast of Virginia. It hot, humid, in fact flooded. At first, I thought the horse pasture was a lake. We’re there for a week; the AC is running twenty-four hours a day.
So, there was still the question of why the couple who bought the camper first sold it within a year. The manager started with “The wife was diagnosed with….” I held up a hand. This was after Cindy’s breast cancer; we’d had all the diagnoses we needed. “She had trouble making the bed.” I thought the guy must be a putz. Your wife is sick and she still has to make the bed? Anyway, it sounded bogus. Then I saw where the guy had jackknifed the trailer to the point of putting a hefty dent in the heavy frame right behind the hitch and thought maybe it wasn’t the wife that couldn’t handle the trailer but the husband. All became clear in the fullness of time.
On the third day, water began dripping from the AC into the camper. Like I said, it’s hot and humid as Florida in August. The water is supposed to drain out one of four channels that run off the corners of the trailer, but somehow the water was being blocked. Then I remembered another detail. The front vent on the AC was broken, the little plastic vent had been removed, and damaged in the process. The guy had had the same problem, removed the vent incautiously, and broken the little plastic tabs that hold cheap plastic crap like that in. That he had taken it no further told me he was not “handy.” The vents don’t let you see anything, so I grabbed my handy electric screw gun and removed the facing on the AC. The facing is all you see; the machine itself is on the roof. And I finally knew what the lady had been diagnosed with: rat-itis. That’s right. Rats.
The plenum is the box in an AC where the air passes over the cooling coils. The first thing I saw was a perfect rat-hole chewed through the plenum from the outside, under the cowling. Air conditioners on roofs are nothing new. Most buildings of any size have them, and they have to suck a lot of air. It comes in underneath an exterior cowling that lets rats in. This was nothing new to me; (Black Sabbath playing in the background) I…AM…BUG…MAN. I spent 42 years killing, removing, and preventing all kinds of pests, including bugs, rats, bees, animals of all sort, including an alligator one time and a nest of coral snakes another.
What had happened was that the rats had nested inside the plenum and outside, in the cowling, which covers the AC but has a gap at the bottom to let in air, just like the buildings I dealt with so many times. I pulled tons of leaves, pine needles, and rat shit out of the hole from the cowling, but the real problem was the accumulated junk in the AC outlet. While we stayed in the swelter of eastern Virginia running the AC full time for the first time (our first time), the built-up condensation had literally floated the rat poops and other dreck into the little holes to the outside that usually run off the water and plugged them.
Once again, old news to me. I have extensive experience on how to repair rat damage and clean out the gook. Once had a neighbor who had worked for my wife’s cleaning service, and when I’d get a bad rat job, I’d call her for serious cleaning, and she was paid well. I never worked for cheap. Anyway, I took a heavy wire and reamed the holes, which helped, although it didn’t solve the problem completely. Cleaned out the nesting material and rat shit, sealed the hole with expanding foam and duct tape, then I had to repair the piece of insulation chewed by the rats. This piece separated the plenum from the outlet, because otherwise it allows hot air to be sucked in with the cooled air, and the chewed insulation was also a significant portion of the crap that had plugged the drain holes. That I fixed with spray foam trimmed to fit the hole and duct tape to seal it. The rat hole caused a similar problem. Sucking air from the outside, hot and humid, into the plenum is a bad idea.
I didn’t really finish the job until we came home from the great camper disaster. I rigged PVC pipes that reduced a shop-vac intake down to the size of the drain holes, and vacuumed a horror show of rat crap, chewed insulation and leaf litter out of them. The rig had to have a short 180-degree turn, like the dentist’s suction tube, because the holes are oriented downward inside an eighteen by twelve inch, nearly inaccessible hole in the ceiling, which honestly had already made this repair job a nightmare. Except for the rat hole, which was visible from the bottom, everything I did was by feel.
But on the bright side of the road, mystery solved. I have often likened pest problems to detective work. One must know his enemy and his ways; I had my answer. The couple who bought the trailer only knew that the AC leaked and maybe that there were rats. When the rats were active, they would have made themselves known, running around at night, probably totally freaked out that their home had suddenly started moving and they weren’t in Kansas anymore. And when it was moving was the only time the couple would have known they had a problem. Rats are a lot like people, and they don’t like it when somebody moves their cheese (actually they don’t much like cheese). So, momma freaks out, she’ll never sleep in this camper again, like I said, rat-itis. I’ve seen it a million times. We saved about four thousand dollars on this camper because of something I would have fixed for them for one hundred. I have rat repellent that I use around the trailer when it’s parked, because a good place for rats is a good place for rats. No reason some other rat might not want to move in. They can smell where other rats have been up to a year later. Couldn’t have asked for a better explanation for the early sale, and it was something I know how to deal with. Roger Owens, Rat Detective.
| Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens |
Rats! What a disastrous comedown!
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