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Our RV is Driving Us BATTY… Again!

Our RV is Driving Us BATTY… Again!

If our video about a bat roosting under one of our windshield screens gave you the willies a couple of years ago, brace yourself for a small colony of them!

On a recent quiet afternoon, we heard the faint sound of scratching behind our refrigerator. Since it’s fall, and getting pretty cool at night, we assumed it was a mouse making a nest. We’ve had a few mice on board over the years and know that getting rid of them before they can do any damage is important.

So we removed the outside vent behind our fridge to scope it out, and nearly had a heart attack as about 2 dozen little brown bats spilled out!

Don’t get us wrong. We love and appreciate what wonderful creatures bats are (apart from the guano and potential rabies). They eat a ton of bugs, especially mosquitoes, and we don’t want to harm them. But we don’t want them sharing our home with us either.

This short videos shows a couple of steps we’ve taken to make our home more bat-resistant. Even though we shot this during the day, we made sure to wait until late at night (while they were out feeding) to block their re-entry. There are lots of trees and other places for them to roost, so they just had to find another home when they came back the next morning to find that we’d changed the locks.

Hopefully, the second time’s a charm. We weren’t able to capture all of them on video (running the other way screaming isn’t the recommended way to capture wildlife video). But the sight of that wall of brown fur that greeted us when that vent came off is probably all the bat visuals we need for the foreseeable future anyway.


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Amy

Friday 29th of March 2019

You two are great! My husband and I have learned quite a bit from watching your videos. We are not full-timers, like yourselves, as we have a daughter still in school, so our trips happen about every 4 months. We store our RV in a garage. On our last trip out, we discovered we had a couple of visitors (mice)-EEK! We have caught them, but we can't figure how they got in the RV - can't find a point of entry. We own a Ventana LE. We thought you guys might know a point of entry since you seem to know Newmars pretty well. Any info would be greatly appreciated! Thanks so much for all the great info you share with the RV world!

TheRVgeeks

Friday 29th of March 2019

Hi Amy! We can tell you from long experience that it is virtually impossible to stop mice from getting into an RV. If you are parked in an area with mice, they will get in. We gave up trying to stop them with steel wool stuffed into openings, dryer sheets, peppermint oil, electronic repellers and all the other things that are supposed to stop them. We've tried them all and nothing works. The only thing we've ever found that works is to keep a few traps set up in areas we noticed activity (droppings) in the basement, baited with a little peanut butter, and check them regularly. We have no problem killing them humanely (i.e. quickly... we never use glue traps, which just torture them). Of course you could use live catch traps too, but we tried that, and unless we drove them a long way away, they seem to come right back in the next day. We found some awesome traps that are easy to bait, set and re-use without ever touching the mice. They're very effective and look, and work, very much like these: https://amzn.to/2V7KvaO We love these, and leave several set up in the basement all the time. Catching them before they do damage is so important. Hope this helps!

Lonnie Dobbs

Wednesday 21st of September 2016

During a power failure, does the refrigerator automatically stay ruining in the auto mode, or do I need to light a pilot light somewhere?

TheRVgeeks

Wednesday 21st of September 2016

Hi Lonnie,

In "Auto" mode, an RV refrigerator (propane/electric) should automatically switch over to run on propane. That's what the "Auto" function is for. You CAN force it to run on just propane (i.e. if you are on a low amperage shore connection and want to free up 110V power for other appliances) or just electric (if you need to conserve propane), but we always left ours on "Auto" so it would handle it for us. Any fairly modern RV refrigerator should run this way (our Norcold fridges in both our 2002 Bounder Diesel and the one we replaced in our 2005 Mountain Aire did, anyway).

Lou Hernandez

Monday 12th of September 2016

You guys are great. Thank you for your time to make these video.......they are very helpful to my wife and me......Lou

Quig

Friday 9th of September 2016

Where's the video???? Without video this is just some internet conspiracy against Bats or RVers or maybe against refrigerators.

Ron Howard says a good director always asks for a second take.

Oh well, it's still a good story.

Cyndy

Friday 9th of September 2016

And this solved your battiness problem?

TheRVgeeks

Friday 9th of September 2016

Of all people in this whole world, you should know better than anyone that it will take far more than a couple of little screens and some tape to cure my battiness! CYNDY!!!!! So great to see you here!! :D

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