Lazy Daze Owners' Group

Mice - Engine and GenSet woes - A precautionary tale you may heard before!!

July 17, 2017, 08:49:02 pm

I have a 99 26 IB - Circumstances have kept it uncharacteristically idle for over six months. Although I started and ran the generator several times a month and drove the RV a few times  just as a maintenance check. As I was getting ready for a summer ramble north, I had both engine and generator problems.  The engine started hard and would only run semi smoothly at highway speeds.. The problem turned out to be a large mouse nest in the air intake.. relatively simple and inexpensive to fix.. the Onan Gen-Set ,which had been ultra reliable, was another story.. It started hard and ran very very rough and died. It did this until after about six attempts to keep it running long enough to smooth out it vibrated wildly and died for good and would only click and would not turn over even once.  After trying everything within my skill set and seeking some advice on this forum I took it into the Cummins Onan dealer repair center, a huge 8 bay shop with diesel trucks, buses and heavy machinery sitting all over waiting to be serviced.  The first issue discovered was that the engine was actually locked up and had to be manually turned to "unfreeze" it. It was necessary to remove it and take it to the bench where day after day new issues were discovered - first one mouse nest was cleaned out, then another, until finally three separate mouse nests, each about the size of a cue ball and densely packed were removed. After much troubleshooting the shop put their best gen tech on it and he finally got it fully functional. Parts list included, coil, starter, ignition module, plugs, spark plug wires, pick up, muffler, tailpipe,  and a few more. At one point I think the tech was confused and "easter egging" it (as we called it when I was a radar tech in the Navy) - after I voiced that opinion politely to the shop manager, they put a more experienced tech on it and in a few days (and a few more parts) it was running smoothly and reinstalled. When I went to pick it up they showed me the bad parts which they had started keeping after I grew suspicious and asked them to - and in the end - I was satisfied that I had not been mistreated badly if at all.  A final bill was $1365.00 after they adjusted it some - they took out some part charges that might not have been bad (coil).  They had not kept the coil so I could not verify it was bad but that was mox nix. Alls well that ends well and Hornblower is ready to go - we leave in the morning for the northwest (Olympic Peninsula via a few weeks in Banff).    Mice did not do all the damage to the gen-set  but they were responsible for a good deal of it..one nest had completely filled the area in which the starter gear engages the engine and the starter gear had half the teeth sheared off. . 
The more eloquent on this forum can articulate the moral of this story better than me, but simply put - an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  I had put mouse traps in the RV (never caught one) but had not made any efforts to keep them out of the engine compartment or Onan bay. In the future, I will combine all known remedies when Hornblower is sitting idle for long.. including mothballs in the Onan bay and steel wool barriers as I can figure out how to place them and a preliminary visual check of the obvious places (air cleaner ) .. Any and all comments
 welcome to help others avoid this kind of mess.

Re: Mice - Engine and GenSet woes - A precautionary tale you may heard before!!

Reply #2 – July 17, 2017, 10:22:19 pm

Several years ago, a friend's LD was brutally attacked, well moved into, by a cute wood rat, preparing itself for the winter.
Preparing its winter home, in the valley between the engine's heads, it had stockpiled hundreds of acorns, also clearing out all the wires and plastic vacuum tubes that got in the way.
Her rig rig barely made it here, with the HVAC system totally inoperative. Her right foot was well cooked too.
Rat damage | Flickr
The cute little guy had also stockpiled a adequate supply of rat bait, which may have lead to his untimely demise.
To provide a comfy bed, a good portion of the firewall insulation had been ripped off and used as a mattress.
Replacing the chewed away HVAC vacuum supply line was a real PIA.

Keeping rodents away from your LD is a very good idea, no matter how cute they are.

Larry

Re: Mice - Engine and GenSet woes - A precautionary tale you may heard before!!

Reply #4 – July 19, 2017, 09:07:19 pm

Amen to the Fresh Cab!  I swear by the stuff & buy it in bulk like Kent mentioned, & do the same (two under the hood, one in  the genn compartment & each storage bay, plus one in the cab/one in the kitchen & one in the bedroom--no visitors since I started using Fresh Cab--& LDy Lulubelle lives in machine shed out at the farm with plenty of evidence of critters all over the shed.

Lynne