Ants in the AC!!!

diyntn

I was gonna put this in HVAC, but I thought others might miss it. I'm not a HVAC person, and you guys might have seen this before, but this shocked me.
Found this when a buddy and I went out to check on my ac unit. A contact was bad.
I didn't THINK we had an ant problem!
Yikes! I just can't figure why they'd want to build in there of all places.
We had ran it some this year, so it wasn't abandoned.
It's better in there than in our house.
Needless to say they are all gone. I didn't want to spray into the wires, so I used canned air to blow em out. I'm gonna put some ant poison around the unit.
Just fyi for you folks,
Mark

clintb

I don't know if ants in, and around, electrical is a problem in most of the country, but when I lived in TX, we would always have fire ants invading the HVAC unit outside. Something about them being drawn to electricity. Crazy, huh?

diyntn

There was a picture of it on here, but it's been removed. Not sure why, but it sorta lost it's zing without a picture of those 100's of ants carrying those white things building around those wires.

Thurman

According to a Georgia Power Company Engineer: ants love the "vibrations" let off by electrical wiring. In my area we have those transformer boxes that are about a cubic yard size mounted on the ground. Fire ants will actually get into them, build a mound that will short them out and "BANG", electricity goes out to maybe six houses at a time. I have actually seen one of those fully functional boxes when opened there was no room left for electrical anything, just full of good old south GA. red clay and ants. The cable TV boxes and telephone company boxes are not exempt either, these little buggers do not discriminate.