A mammoth undertaking

The mice came back in November, as they have done every year for well over a decade. It’s no coincidence that my annual rolling contract with the pest control company has a renewal date in November. The change in weather drives them to take shelter indoors, and then they hold tap-dancing parties directly above my bed. Martin the Mousekiller was very good as usual – we agreed a convenient time for him to turn up, he put more poison down, removed a dead mouse from the loft, and presented me with his invoice for another 12 months call outs.

The loud noises above my bed which had been keeping me awake at night died down after a few days, along presumably with the mice. Unfortunately, my burglar alarm also died around the same time – or rather, the loudspeaker attached to it did. The alarm was still working, but at a much reduced volume, coming only from the control panel. Living out in the middle of nowhere, I do depend on my neighbours being able to hear the alarm if it goes off. So it needed to get fixed, though I didn’t want to pay emergency call out rates for something that clearly wasn’t an emergency.

The alarm company sent a technician this morning to service the alarm and fix the problem. He initially thought that the loudspeaker would need replacing, but on closer examination he found that was in full working order. It was the cabling from the control panel to the speaker that had failed. That runs through the loft space, right where the mice were active. It seems that the most likely cause of failure was a mouse nibbling through the insulation and breaking the connection. Not good. But it could have been worse – the technician said that if the mouse had bitten through both cables and shorted them, the control panel would have gone bang!

He wasn’t keen to go crawling around in my loft, and I wasn’t keen on the thought of an exploding control panel if it happened again. So we agreed that he’d install a new loudspeaker closer to the control panel that would mean he didn’t need to route wires through the loft. It all seems to be working again now, and is hopefully a bit more mouse-proof.