Are rodents the cause of most electrical fires?

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I wired a remodel house a couple or three years ago. The house had sat empty for a while. They pretty much gutted the house so I was wiring with all new wire with all the old ripped out. The guys that were doing the job told me they had mice/rat carcasses in almost every wall. They had a picture of one wall where the carcasses were piled up about a foot deep! It was a mess for sure because the rodents had the run of the place for quite some time.

Fast forward, I was in the trim-out portion of the job. The HVAC installer told me that there was a skint wire running through by the air handler. I just figured it either got snagged when pulling or just a bad place in the spool. I repaired it as it was easy to get to. After that, I was shown several places with wire damage. GC thought that the wire was caught on something and was pulled and ripped the insulation. I pulled all the wire myself and knew I wouldn't have kept pulling if I felt it hang. So I'm thinking I got a bad spool of NM as it was all 14-2 that was damaged. Then, they started finding 12-2. After checking all the wires that I was shown, it became apparent that the wire wasn't ripped or bad, it was the MICE!!!

This only took a few weeks between the rough and trim for them to cause this damage. Most of the damaged area was in a chase built around the HVAC trunk line. I told the GC about it and he just laughed and said he still thought I ripped it during the pull. I told him he should know there was rodents since he was the one that saw them during the demo. I told him to set some traps just to see. He set 6 traps and the next day he had 6 mice caught. He got serious then and put out poison everywhere he could find a place to put it.
 
Mice are such a pain, you really have to keep up with it. I go through periods of setting traps religiously and it seems like I take them all out and then I inevitably stop thinking about it and setting traps, then sure enough they come back again. One thing that really helps is I have these bucket traps: it's a 5 gallon pail with water with a can strung across the top of it. You put peanut butter on the can and they fall into the water. You can catch A LOT of mice that way with no involvement. It does start to smell pretty bad so you can put a bunch of bleach in there helps a lot. And of course antifreeze if it's winter.
 
Little Bill said:
I wired a remodel house a couple or three years ago. The house had sat empty for a while. They pretty much gutted the house so I was wiring with all new wire with all the old ripped out. The guys that were doing the job told me they had mice/rat carcasses in almost every wall. They had a picture of one wall where the carcasses were piled up about a foot deep! It was a mess for sure because the rodents had the run of the place for quite some time.

Fast forward, I was in the trim-out portion of the job. The HVAC installer told me that there was a skint wire running through by the air handler. I just figured it either got snagged when pulling or just a bad place in the spool. I repaired it as it was easy to get to. After that, I was shown several places with wire damage. GC thought that the wire was caught on something and was pulled and ripped the insulation. I pulled all the wire myself and knew I wouldn't have kept pulling if I felt it hang. So I'm thinking I got a bad spool of NM as it was all 14-2 that was damaged. Then, they started finding 12-2. After checking all the wires that I was shown, it became apparent that the wire wasn't ripped or bad, it was the MICE!!!

This only took a few weeks between the rough and trim for them to cause this damage. Most of the damaged area was in a chase built around the HVAC trunk line. I told the GC about it and he just laughed and said he still thought I ripped it during the pull. I told him he should know there was rodents since he was the one that saw them during the demo. I told him to set some traps just to see. He set 6 traps and the next day he had 6 mice caught. He got serious then and put out poison everywhere he could find a place to put it.
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Early in my career we were pulling 500 mcm from the transformer to the electrical room, about 350’, about halfway through the pull we found gashes in the insulation. Pulled that back out with a Lull, pulled in the next run, found the same thing again. Had to send all the wire back because every roll was gashed.
 
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