Can bats get in through air conditioners

There are many movies and shows that show bats as creatures of the dark. This is why having them in your home is never something you would want, even in your worst nightmares. But, how do bats even get inside your house in the first place? Can bats come through air conditioners?

Bats are the last thing you want in your home. The younger bats are usually the problem here. Once they earned their wings and start to fly with the colony’s older bats, they tend to get lost and end up flying around. Sometimes, they may wander off and get inside your living space through small spaces like that space in your air conditioner.

How do bats get in through your air conditioner

Bats can sense the flow of air coming through the tiny gaps in your AC or window unit. They will then land on your air conditioner, crawl up in between the glass panes, and crawl right inside your house.

It is especially true in the case of homes that were already bat-proofed. Once you evict a group of bats from your attic, they will always be on the lookout for another new point of entry. For bats, your unsealed air conditioner is just like a welcome mat for them. 

Do bats like air conditioning

Even if bats play an important role in the local ecosystem, no one wants to see these flying animals in their air conditioning units. Bats can easily hamper the overall performance of your cooling systems, cause some unwanted odors, and worse, end up dying in the ducts that can make it more difficult for you to remove them. Knowing and understanding what draws them to your ductwork will help you fortify your house better to keep these bats outside once and for all.

The sensitivity of a bat to air currents is what attracts these animals to enter your air conditioning. Once your home’s temperature drops every night, cool air coming from outside your home gets drawn to the openings in the ventilation. 

Bats use these currents of cool air as a signal for them to feed but the problem here is that the cool air current happens to lead towards your house so these animals might end up finding their way inside the air ducts through a hole or crack.

If it is any consolation, bats don’t want to be in your house any more than you like them to. It is just that they got lost along the way. As mentioned earlier, most of the bats that end up in your air ducts are the younger ones finding their way through the air for the very first time.

Can bats come in through the furnace

Bats are animals living in colonies and you will know you have a bat issue at hand if you ever discover even one bat inside the house.

Bats could show up inside your home anytime although they most often appear when the weather is hot. They don’t live in attics that tend too cold during winter and too hot when summer months arrive.  But, they usually pass through the spaces in the attic and leave behind their droppings.

These animals often live mainly in the interior walls that provide stable temperatures and protection. The walls also have ducts, wires, and pipes that give bats a path for moving around the house. 

Hot weather can also drive bats to cooler spots such as the basement. Holes surrounding ductwork, wires, and pipes are the areas where most bats get to enter your living space, particularly in furnace rooms and unfinished basements.  

Once they get inside, bats may move from one room to another by crawling through ductwork or doors, which is why it is also common to see them in bedrooms.

Bats can leave behind trails of scent that other bats follow. When they find a way inside your house, you can pretty much expect them to continue coming back. 

Bats living in HVAC

While bats are not noisy during the daytime, these animals could still cause plenty of problems. It doesn’t matter if they roost in your HVAC or just use this to gain access to the insides of walls or your attic, bats can leave behind wet and sticky guano deposits.

Bat guano not only causes staining and water damage but can also create some health hazards for you and your pets. While you might never come into close contact with these bats, their guano can make you contact Histoplasmosis. This happens even if you just breathe in spores. This is why the presence of bats in your HVAC that circulates air also poses a major health risk.

Once you suspect or find bats living in your HVAC, you need to contact a professional wildlife specialist to get rid of them and deal with the guano before letting the professionals clean your entire duct system.

How to get rid of bats from AC

Trying to get rid of bats from your AC might not be something that you can do on your own. Instead, you can get the help of professionals to ensure that you don’t deal with these flying animals.

Now, once the experts have freed your AC of bats, it is time for you to be sure that they won’t be able to get inside every again.

  • Identify the gap between your windows.
  • Put one end of the foam on the left part of the gap.
  • Move from left to right and push down the foam to the gap as you go.
  • You will be good to go once you have stuffed and filled in the gap.

See to it that the unit’s adjustable wings are all tight against the bottom and sides of the window frame. You can use small screws to keep the wings in the proper place.

How to get a bat out of a vent

First, determine if you are dealing with an entire colony or just one wayward bat. If there is one colony, all of them must be able to fly before you can start your efforts of directing them out the vent. Using a one-way valve is the ideal method of removal.

It could be in the form of an empty caulk tube, a short length of pipe, or a piece of mesh netting to partially seal the outside of the access points of the bats. Once you have set up the one-way valve device, wait for 5 to 7 days for all the bats to leave the vent.

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