Foxes

[Garry Blackburn]

I recentley carried out an installation in a small urban garden in London. Two weeks later, the lady phoned to inform me that a fox had chewed through a cable, disabling one of the fittings.

Three days later I called to investigate and sure enough, a low voltage cable had been dug up and chewed at its entry point to the recessed fitting. Luckily, I had all the equipment on my van to rectify the problem.

On finishing, I asked the lady if she has a regular problem with foxes, to which she replied "Oh yes, I feed them every night".......

As it was a new installation, and I was in the area, I was prepared to overlook any charge, but she kindly insisted on paying me.

This is my first experience of having cables damaged by animals, and I wonder if this is much of a problem in the USA.

[sitelights]

I live in Reading, Berks County so you can tell how much the early settlers identified this area with the England they left. Not foxes but groundhogs are the main culprits here. In general, rodentia: groundhogs, squirrels and chipmunks cause some damage to our systems every year. We have foxes too, but if one came near enough to feed I would suspect rabies. The front teeth of rodentia (which also includes rats and mice amongst others) constantly grow and they must chew to keep their teeth at an optimal length. Groundhogs like to be well-hidden when they chew so most of our problems stem from running cable under a slightly raised deck or walkway where the cable presents an ideal chewing object. If the cable is stapled to the underside of the deck/walk it is out of harm's way but it is not always possible to get underneath to do this. We sleeve the cable with metal conduit before we splice in a run of new cable; PVC won't work because the groundhog will eventually chew though that. Squirrels are more likely to chew tree wire but I've noticed that they are more interested in the splice caps that connect the heavy gauge to the light gauge wires. We spray paint these caps black which takes care of the problem. See my post on crimp splices for details of our method of splicing. Our policy is to never accept payment for work done for the client; the only things not covered under warranty or service agreement are theft or vandalism which are insurance matters. However one must be gracious and if a client insists on paying (or tipping) cash I tell my service person to buy themselves a good lunch with it.

[landscapelight]

Never had any problem with foxes, however last month on a job site during the designing we encountered a rather large bear, needless to say we didnt light him up in our design but we thought of charging the homeowner for the use of our running shoes.