I can't comment on SWA / CST armoured cable plant in ducts, but having
had pet rats for several years, they enjoy chewing through everything
from PE and similar plastics through to steel braiding. The only thing
that will stop them is the point at which their teeth are no longer able
to physically tear through whatever material they're presented with,
which means non trivial thicknesses of steel.
If I were you, I would find out if there were any rat owners in the
locality and ask them if you could string a couple of sections of
whatever cabling you're planning to use inside their cage for a week or
two and see what happens to it. Then extrapolate the damage from the
test period of a week or two to the planned cable lifetime of several
years. Most rat fanciers wouldn't be bothered by this because their
pets will have a long history of chewing the cage bars, which are made
of steel. I.e. this is no more damaging to them than what they have
already.
They're wonderful pets btw.
Nick
David Round wrote on 14/11/2019 12:44:
Until recently we had never had an issue with rats damaging our fibres
in our many underground ducts. Over the last few years we have been
installing CST armoured fibres because other people have had problems
with rodents and also we judged that CST would probably be enough to
stop new cables sawing through existing ones when they were drawn in – a
problem we have had. Just recently we have had two cases of rat damage
with a number of fibres being cut. These were older, unarmoured duct
grade cables. Our two pronged plan was to pull in replacement CST
armoured cables and try and control the rats. When talking to the rodent
control chap though, I got a bit of a surprise. He said that the rats
would prefer to gnaw on the armoured cable and would easily cut through
the CST armour. Does anyone have any real-world experience of this?
Should we be installing SWA armoured? Are there any other actions we
should be considering? The rodent control chap suggested sealing up the
ends of the ducts in each chamber, not to stop the rats, but to allow us
to track them so that we can find where they are getting in to the network.
Thank you in advance for any advice.
David
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