An Engineering Problem

A few days ago my gray cat brought in a chipmunk, and it escaped by going into the broken vent by the sun porch door, (the previous owners had made louvers of thin strips of mirror, and of course one broke, leaving a chipmunk-sized gap.) I had hoped the chipmunk would just come out on it's own eventually (I had a mole do that in New Jersey) but no, it was very quiet, and then yesterday I noticed a ...smell...in the hallway. A very unique smell of a small mammal decomposing. And it was coming from the heater vent in the hall, which you can see as the hole in the wall in the photo above. At first I thought there must be an access panel downstairs, but no. This is the underside of that duct and vent:

No access panel, and no room to work even if there was one; it's also by a poorly-placed gas line. So whatever I was going to do, was going to have to be done by reaching into the vent hole, which was shaped like a J. I found a flashlight with a super-bright LED and a mirror from my purse (My house is full of mirrors, all the wrong size or glued to the walls--though I suppose I could have pried off another slat of the broken vent, now that I think of it.) I tied some of my doll stringing ribbon to the mirror and dangled it down the hole, using the reflection from the flashlight to light the inside of the duct. I could see a lot of gray hairy lumps..and yes there was one with feet. You can imagine the smell--J says he can't smell it, but I bet he could have if he had his nose where I had mine, stuffed into the vent. I took the plastic nozzle off of the vacuum cleaner and threaded it down around the curve; and discovered while I could flop it around in the duct, it wanted to stick to the walls, making loud frustrated sucking noises, instead of getting up the lumpy stuff. So I pulled the hose back out,washed it, and got my "doll wiring" 16 gauge wire, and bent it into a four foot long thing with a hook at the end, and threaded it down the hole-- and discovered that I couldn't hold the flashlight, the mirror and the wire all at once; so I had to sort of remember where things were before I poked...unfortunately I am slightly dyslexic, and stuff in the mirror is backwards (and for a while I was peering at the ceiling of the duct before I realized that I was upside down)so my thrashing netted some huge ugly hairballs and no chipmunk (he was a little soggy by now). So finally I took my camera and tied a ribbon on the anchor on the side of it, turned on the flash, and dangled it down the hole, and took a photo:

Of course it shows nothing, and J commented on the James Cameron-like appearance of it by saying I had "been in the bathysphere too long and was starting to see krakens and mermaids". What it really means is that I pushed the chipmunk remains further into the system (you can just see where there is some residual fur on the duct floor). Then I thought about leaving the heater off until, say, next October. Unfortunately, it will be in the high 30's tonight, so we have to run it. Maybe the heat will just dry the remains out more, like a tiny mummy.

I did put mesh over the broken vent.

Oh, the tiny red shoe in the first picture--that belongs to Stripey, and she brought it over while I was working--I think she was "helping". She stood on me for a minute or two and then got down, knocking over the vent cover, which made a huge "bang" on the tiles... and then I had no helpers.