Squirrel! Anyone have squirrels eating cabling?

impoid

No, literally... watch out for squirrels! I spent the better part of a week trying to figure out why my Internet kept intermittently going in and out (Xfinity 1Gb coax service in metro Detroit, Michigan, with my own DOCSIS 3.1 modem and an amazing Eero mesh). My Fingbox was really helpful in notifying me when stuff went offline and then came back online. Random outages that would last between 10 minutes and 5 hours sometimes, yet the cable TVs all worked fine; it was quite perplexing. Comcast's remote diagnostics said all was fine on their end, so I bought a different DOCSIS 3.1 modem (now I have a spare) to see if that was the problem. I eventually called Comcast and they sent out a repair guy the next day. Turns out the insulation in the coax cabling is corn-based, and my neighborhood squirrels figured that out and were slowly eating my cable line between the house and the utility pole! So... watch out for squirrels! ;-)

Marc

Bings back memories @impoid.  Back in the day I had a legacy copper phone line connection from the house to the service pole from Verizon here in the US. Every year like clockwork our phone service would go down.  And in just about every case it was squirrel nests weighing down the cable and causing connections to fail.   They can be a handful, that's for sure.

VioletChepil

Thanks for reporting this @impoid
Anyone have issues with squirrels and chewed cabelling on the Fing Community?
I've just slightly modified the title of this one. Wondering if there are other squirrel stories to add. 

kltaylor

I've had that issue before, too.  Not just with squirrels though, but also with the puppers from time to time.

Hronos

Same here, at a work place, the neighborhood has squirrels and they really like that corn based insulation xD, in my case fiber one.  Every 2 or 3 month our site got disconnected from the WAN network and we couldn't do anything about it xD.  Our communication provider kind of "repel" the attacks be socking the line on tar, I personally don't like it, but it work till weather wash it from the line... xD

Pixelpopper

I work for a major UK communications company and experience issues with “cable nibbling” on an almost daily basis, squirrels, rats, mice and woodpeckers amongst the worst offenders. However, the most common problem is where overhead cables pass through trees. The cables continually rub on the branches of trees removing insulation & then water ingress causes noisy voice calls and drastically reduced broadband speeds.

SimoneSpinozzi

I have a several photovoltaic plants. Had rodent problems. Planted snakes. Problem solved. Snakes don't go hunting for humans and they aren't venomous anyway. Same species as the indigenous ones. Bought at a pet store given by the nearest forest guard.

The snakes did not breed much therefore they aren't killing many rodents, i guess most rodents get scared more by the scent of a snake than the scent of their own fried corpses.

RainCaster

The squirrels love the warm space under the hood of my Lexus, so they ate all that wiring on the top of the engine block. It cost our insurance almost $10K to repair.