Anyone have rodent issues with their Tahoe?

[Caligirl]

I can't say for sure how to prevent entirely the damn mice from getting into the truck - other than I there's a whole bunch of stuff posted on the interwebs about different methods people used to deter them - and that I believe that the overall environment the truck is parked in has something to do with whether or not they're going to try and take up residence.

I have had problems with mice in pretty much every car I've had at my current home - except for (as far as I know) - my 2010 Yukon XL. I am not sure exactly why - but I've never detected any signs of mice getting into the thing - maybe I just haven't seen them yet. The worse case of mice wrecking a vehicle though - was my 2003 Suburban 2500. The truck started running like crap - and I started chasing the problem, ended up getting a higher end code reader so I could figure out where the issue was coming from. The first code I pulled - indicated the fuel pump was bad. Which made sense because I knew that the sender / pump unit had rust issues (it leaked and a dealer had diagnosed it a couple of years before). So the first thing I did was pull the tank and replace the pump. Not actually that hard of a job. I reset the codes - and the truck still ran like crap (it would die at speed on the highway and things like that).

Pulled the codes again - and this time it was spitting out a cam sensor code. So I pulled the manifold and replaced that. Reset the codes - still ran like crap and now it was spitting out a cranks sensor code. Looked at the crank sensor and it was pretty rusty - to the point where it looked like it had pushed out from the block a bit. So I pulled the old one - cleaned everything up - an put in a new cranks sensor. Ran good for a very little bit - and then had the same dying issue. Pulled the codes again - and it was spitting out ignition codes. Started looking at plugs and wires and found some of the wires were really bad and I had a broken plug. Replaced plugs, wires, and coils. Ran good for a little bit - and then once the truck got hot - it ran like crap again. At this point I was like WTF is wrong with this thing. A couple of friends suggested looking for mouse damage to the wiring.

So - I pulled the fuse box up - and lo and behold the main harness under the fuse box in the engine compartment had been SEVERELY chewed up - to the point where there was like 15 different wires chewed up and at least 5 to my memory - that were totally chewed thru. So I spent a long Sunday afternoon carefully putting the harness back together and armoring it all up some so the mice couldn't get to it again.

That sort of made the truck run better - for a very short while - but it would still die - and die during weird things like run good going down a hill - but die trying to go back up. I did notice however that it seemed to get worse when the truck warmed up. At this point - I had already done all the previously mentioned stuff - and even replaced the cam sensor AGAIN, because I suspected I screwed up the first install. I sort of figured it might be the ECU at this point - but everybody swore up and down that wasn't the problem. Even had a friend that was a GM technician come out and use his GM Tech 2 on the thing - while we pulled the whole entire wire harness apart. We couldn't find anything that looked like a wiring issue.

So I took a wild guess it was the ECU - and got a replacement ECU from one of those online places (can't remember off hand which one it was - but I could look it up). It wasn't all that expensive - I think it was only like $150 or something like that. What I did to try and diagnose it - was run the truck when it was cold - and it seemed to drive ok. Did this on a relatively cold October morning. Then - I let it all cool down - and put a heat gun on the ECU before even driving the truck. That seemed to make it run like crap.

So I replaced the ECU - programmed it according to the instructions - and took the truck out for a drive - NO PROBLEMS. In fact it ran great - more power than I ever remember it having. Probably becuase there other issues in there like the bad ignition components.


I did this all myself - and all said it probably took me about 3 months to sort the damn thing out. In the end - my final analysis is that the mouse damage on the harness probably fried the ECU somehow so that it just failed in weird ways. That's what all the random codes were probably about. Fixing the harness didn't solve the already screwed up ECU issue.

I friggin HATE mice.

But - I think part of the issue here is that my property is "mouse friendly". I get the damn things in my garage/barn as well. I live in a suburban lot - but it's overgrown in some areas and it borders some woods. I have a gravel driveway. In the spring - I find the mouse tunnels all over my property under the snow. My father has a more manicured suburban property - with a larger lawn , a paved driveway - and a couple of cats. I don't recall him ever having mouse issues. At least not to the extent I have had.

People forget that one of there reasons why the lawn and manicured property thing exists - is to keep away pests. It was why that all evolved in the first place.


I've got an Acura TL in my driveway that I had to pull apart because the damn mice got into the vent system and peed all over it or something. It sat for a couple months at one point while I waited for parts - and when I finally got it fixed and went to drive it - I got sick because of the junk coming out of the HVAC system. So I pulled the damn thing apart and still haven't been able to get it back together again.

I HATE MICE.

My last suggestion would be: find whichever way works to just kill the maximum amount of them. Traps , cats - whatever. You CAN kill them faster than they can breed. And even mice aren't stupid - they will just stay away from places where they just end up dying.

You need to make the mice understand "this is the genocide zone - you will not come back if you enter here".

Dang...so sorry about all that! I feel ya, I hate them rodents, too.

We have lived on this property for 8 years and never had this problem until about a year ago. Same set up, so not sure why they all of a sudden liked my car :/

I have a neighbor who super manicures his property- it looks like a park and we joke because he will mow his dirt. No extra anything for mice to hide and they still had to get an exterminator to come out to their place recently and they lived up there for 30 years. So definitely something in our environment has changed that is not about terrain. Maybe it's because we had a drought for so many years and then got 2 years of a lot of rain??? All I know is I'm just waiting on the locusts now lol. Oh wait, the cicadas are coming to the Southern states.

 

[Joseph Garcia]

My son has a Honda Civic that he basically stopped using, once the pandemic hit, and he started working from home last March. He went to use the Civic in July, and it barely ran at all. He got it checked out, and found that there was a 'city' of mice living in his muffler, and they had packed his muffler with grass cuttings. He had to have the exhaust system replaced.

 

[calsdad]

Dang...so sorry about all that! I feel ya, I hate them rodents, too.

We have lived on this property for 8 years and never had this problem until about a year ago. Same set up, so not sure why they all of a sudden liked my car :/

I have a neighbor who super manicures his property- it looks like a park and we joke because he will mow his dirt. No extra anything for mice to hide and they still had to get an exterminator to come out to their place recently and they lived up there for 30 years. So definitely something in our environment has changed that is not about terrain. Maybe it's because we had a drought for so many years and then got 2 years of a lot of rain??? All I know is I'm just waiting on the locusts now lol. Oh wait, the cicadas are coming to the Southern states.

Thanks!

It was just very frustrating and massively time consuming - mostly because I did the work myself I suppose. But if I had brought the truck to a dealer or mechanic - the labor charges probably would have made the repair bill equal to 2/3 or more of the market value of the truck.

From your description it does sound like maybe there's been some sort of environmental change. Hard to predict I suppose exactly how long that will last.

 

[Mooseman93]

Fortunately, no wires eaten yet! But they are munching on the interior and we can't kill as many as we have in our area. Really bad for the past year or more.

We have tried everything that is nontoxic to our cats/other predators. Regular traps, probably 100 sticky traps (not just for Camry...they are EVERYWHERE- finally found how they were getting under hot tub. Blocked it. Getting into outside water heater closet. Blocked it. Moved woodpile wayyyyy across yard, and they still hang out in our little pile near house to burn.)

Our cat is trying her best (new blood spots every day on shop floor of another rodent that has bit the dust haha), but we would need a whole army of cats to catch everything. We have fox, bobcat, blue heron, coyote and falcon and we STILL are overrun.

We tried the sonic devices under the hood, in cab and trunk. Worthless. Bought a baited zapper. Won't go in it. Peppermint oil deterrent. Smells nice, but nope.

They get enough food elsewhere (they favor acorns from the abundant oak trees on our acreage) and are looking for a warm place to shelter and/or nest (hood, trunk lid, cab, vents)

So, catching and killing them is only by chance if they accidentally ran across the sticky traps.

Instead, I need ways to keep them out to begin with, particularly the cab. Unless they run out of food and chew on wires, the rest of the Tahoe consists mostly of materials they won't munch.

The chewing on the Camry doesn't seem to be for food...it's to get in/out, for bedding or entertainment lol.

Are there known places they like to shelter or nest or get in to a Tahoe? Places I can block entrance. Help!!!

I have a 2001 Yukun XL. Mice got under the fusebox in the engine bay and gnawed through about 7 wires, causing severe problems with the transmission and the temperature display on the rearview mirror.
The good news is that soldering the wires resolved all the issues, and the fuse box is not hard to unbolt and inspect beneath. Sounds like repelling the critters will be your challenge but anyway, that's where they got me.

 

[George B]

If I thought that that would take care of them I'd might take a chance but there are so many that we would have to poison our 5 acres and I don't know how that's even feasible. But again they have to be hungry and they don't seem to be looking for food so if they're not hungry they won't eat the poison and it doesn't do us any good

They are opportunistic so they will eat it. My MIL had a rat problem they tried to correct for a year with all sorts of "friendly" methods. This resulted in more and more rats. There was plenty of food but they still partook of the Decon. No more rats now.

 

[calsdad]

I have a 2001 Yukun XL. Mice got under the fusebox in the engine bay and gnawed through about 7 wires, causing severe problems with the transmission and the temperature display on the rearview mirror.
The good news is that soldering the wires resolved all the issues, and the fuse box is not hard to unbolt and inspect beneath. Sounds like repelling the critters will be your challenge but anyway, that's where they got me.

That's exactly what happened to my 2003 Suburban 2500. They got into that fusebox and were chewing thru a bunch of the wires under and around the box. As I remember - there were like 5 or 6 wires that were completely severed, and a few more that were hanging on by strands.

 

[Tonyrodz]

I can't say for sure how to prevent entirely the damn mice from getting into the truck - other than I there's a whole bunch of stuff posted on the interwebs about different methods people used to deter them - and that I believe that the overall environment the truck is parked in has something to do with whether or not they're going to try and take up residence.

I have had problems with mice in pretty much every car I've had at my current home - except for (as far as I know) - my 2010 Yukon XL. I am not sure exactly why - but I've never detected any signs of mice getting into the thing - maybe I just haven't seen them yet. The worse case of mice wrecking a vehicle though - was my 2003 Suburban 2500. The truck started running like crap - and I started chasing the problem, ended up getting a higher end code reader so I could figure out where the issue was coming from. The first code I pulled - indicated the fuel pump was bad. Which made sense because I knew that the sender / pump unit had rust issues (it leaked and a dealer had diagnosed it a couple of years before). So the first thing I did was pull the tank and replace the pump. Not actually that hard of a job. I reset the codes - and the truck still ran like crap (it would die at speed on the highway and things like that).

Pulled the codes again - and this time it was spitting out a cam sensor code. So I pulled the manifold and replaced that. Reset the codes - still ran like crap and now it was spitting out a cranks sensor code. Looked at the crank sensor and it was pretty rusty - to the point where it looked like it had pushed out from the block a bit. So I pulled the old one - cleaned everything up - an put in a new cranks sensor. Ran good for a very little bit - and then had the same dying issue. Pulled the codes again - and it was spitting out ignition codes. Started looking at plugs and wires and found some of the wires were really bad and I had a broken plug. Replaced plugs, wires, and coils. Ran good for a little bit - and then once the truck got hot - it ran like crap again. At this point I was like WTF is wrong with this thing. A couple of friends suggested looking for mouse damage to the wiring.

So - I pulled the fuse box up - and lo and behold the main harness under the fuse box in the engine compartment had been SEVERELY chewed up - to the point where there was like 15 different wires chewed up and at least 5 to my memory - that were totally chewed thru. So I spent a long Sunday afternoon carefully putting the harness back together and armoring it all up some so the mice couldn't get to it again.

That sort of made the truck run better - for a very short while - but it would still die - and die during weird things like run good going down a hill - but die trying to go back up. I did notice however that it seemed to get worse when the truck warmed up. At this point - I had already done all the previously mentioned stuff - and even replaced the cam sensor AGAIN, because I suspected I screwed up the first install. I sort of figured it might be the ECU at this point - but everybody swore up and down that wasn't the problem. Even had a friend that was a GM technician come out and use his GM Tech 2 on the thing - while we pulled the whole entire wire harness apart. We couldn't find anything that looked like a wiring issue.

So I took a wild guess it was the ECU - and got a replacement ECU from one of those online places (can't remember off hand which one it was - but I could look it up). It wasn't all that expensive - I think it was only like $150 or something like that. What I did to try and diagnose it - was run the truck when it was cold - and it seemed to drive ok. Did this on a relatively cold October morning. Then - I let it all cool down - and put a heat gun on the ECU before even driving the truck. That seemed to make it run like crap.

So I replaced the ECU - programmed it according to the instructions - and took the truck out for a drive - NO PROBLEMS. In fact it ran great - more power than I ever remember it having. Probably becuase there other issues in there like the bad ignition components.


I did this all myself - and all said it probably took me about 3 months to sort the damn thing out. In the end - my final analysis is that the mouse damage on the harness probably fried the ECU somehow so that it just failed in weird ways. That's what all the random codes were probably about. Fixing the harness didn't solve the already screwed up ECU issue.

I friggin HATE mice.

But - I think part of the issue here is that my property is "mouse friendly". I get the damn things in my garage/barn as well. I live in a suburban lot - but it's overgrown in some areas and it borders some woods. I have a gravel driveway. In the spring - I find the mouse tunnels all over my property under the snow. My father has a more manicured suburban property - with a larger lawn , a paved driveway - and a couple of cats. I don't recall him ever having mouse issues. At least not to the extent I have had.

People forget that one of there reasons why the lawn and manicured property thing exists - is to keep away pests. It was why that all evolved in the first place.


I've got an Acura TL in my driveway that I had to pull apart because the damn mice got into the vent system and peed all over it or something. It sat for a couple months at one point while I waited for parts - and when I finally got it fixed and went to drive it - I got sick because of the junk coming out of the HVAC system. So I pulled the damn thing apart and still haven't been able to get it back together again.

I HATE MICE.

My last suggestion would be: find whichever way works to just kill the maximum amount of them. Traps , cats - whatever. You CAN kill them faster than they can breed. And even mice aren't stupid - they will just stay away from places where they just end up dying.

You need to make the mice understand "this is the genocide zone - you will not come back if you enter here".

I had the same issue with my Tahoe randomly dying--especially when going up hills. Turned out to be a clogged fuel filter. Going up hill would cause the sediment to clog the orifice internally. Changed it and it's never done it again.

 

[Joseph Garcia]

I just refilled my rat poison tray in the portable garage that houses my Yukon. Something really likes those granules.

 

[George B]

I just refilled my rat poison tray in the portable garage that houses my Yukon. Something really likes those granules.

Surly not a repeat customer...

 

[Caligirl]

I have a 2001 Yukun XL. Mice got under the fusebox in the engine bay and gnawed through about 7 wires, causing severe problems with the transmission and the temperature display on the rearview mirror.
The good news is that soldering the wires resolved all the issues, and the fuse box is not hard to unbolt and inspect beneath. Sounds like repelling the critters will be your challenge but anyway, that's where they got me.

The only problem that my husband has had with his last GMC has been exactly what you, and others, have talked about... he had them get into his fuse box and munch a couple wires and so far it's all he's seen in damage. I will see if we can put something in place to keep them out of my vehicle (and his, too)

The Camry had a known entrance point (they'd chew through a plastic grate) that we had to block off with a sheet of steel mesh because they would get into the cabin air filter and makes nests in it and thrash the glovebox- that took care of that. but they're still getting into the cab and into my air vents and I'm wondering if the Tahoes have any similar weak interior entrance spots that I need to be aware of that I can preemptively block. I really don't care if they pee and leave poop all over my engine bay, but I do care when it's all over my seats and my dash ewww