…when rats discovered the delicious, delicious taste of extension cords.
And the trouble with that is that Landlady’s continued water supply in winter requires a heat tape on the cistern’s outlet pipe. Which is about 35 feet from the nearest source of electricity. Every winter for nearly as long as I’ve been here, we’ve stretched an extension cord between those two points without any problem. But once they’ve got the taste of a particular thing, replacing that thing only consigns that new thing to a chopped-up death.
Which is why I wanted to bore a hole in Landlady’s powershed, which is stuccoed. Went ahead and ruined the one hole saw gnawing through the stucco, then yesterday (sigh) I bought a new one to finish going through the plywood. Then I ran the brand-new replacement extension cord through a whole bunch of inch-and-a-half PVC pipe. Since I’m kind of one-armed for shoveling purposes at the moment Landlady dug the trench, I just laid the conduit and hooked things up before we get a hard freeze, which the weatherman says is imminent.
Squirted expanding foam in both ends of the PVC, and once the cistern’s end is properly buried that should at least make the rats have to work a little harder from now on.
Since there is no dead rat in the picture, I assume that the cord wasn’t plugged in. Too bad!
“ruined the one hole saw” and referencing an earlier post:
My ignorance is showing: A) stucco is dried mud-and-straw? B) dried mud-and-straw is really tough stuff? This midwest flandlander knows there is a lot he doesn’t know.
Robert – stucco is concrete and chicken wire. You hang the chicken wire on the side of the building about a half inch away from the wall. Then you force concrete into, behind and around the mesh of the chicken wire. Most of the applications I have seen the thickness is about an inch. Fire retardant and most critters can’t chew through it.
What Judy said…
I might add that properly mixed, applied, and allowed to cure for a few years, stucco becomes seemingly diamond hard. Like most concrete, it is impervious to water and lasts forever. Technically it is only a siding, and not part of the building structure, but I have seen it support walls long after the underlying wood structure has rotted away.
Judy & Ben:
Ah. Thank you. My ignorance is lessened. I was thinking adobe.