Back in 2009, our Golden Retriever started sniffing around our electric meter on the side of the house. When the house was built, there was a large knockout mistakenly knocked out, leaving about a 3" hole in the bottom of the electric box. I shined a flashlight up inside, and saw a black snake completely curled up in there. I touched it with a WOODEN stick, and it moved. It was alive. I figured the way it found itself up there, it can find its way out.
A few days later, we started smelling an awful stench coming from the area around the electric meter, and I surmised what had happened. Sure enough, this time when I poked the snake with the WOODEN stick, it was dead. And decomposing. And stinking... I called Duke power company and told them I needed someone to come out and remove the seal so we could open the electric box and remove the dead snake. The gal said it would be a week or two before they could get someone out. I told her the snake was dead and STINKING. I couldn't wait that long. So, she told me to just go ahead and cut the seal and remove it. She said she would put a notation on my account explaining why the seal was removed.
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It came in through that large hole on the bottom left.
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I found wasp nests, bird nests and all sorts of junk in there.
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He got nailed on the TOP terminals of the meter, which are the INPUT terminals to the meter.
At lease I didn't have to PAY for the electricity that killed him!
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He was a good sized snake. By the time I got to him, he was decomposing, had partially "liquefied" and stunk to high heaven.
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Disposed of him, cleaned all the rest of the other nests out of the electric box, and used two pieces of UN-plated circuit board material to fix the hole. Put 1 round disc on the inside of the box, and another on the outside, and with a nut & bolt through both of them, sealed the hole from any more outside critters.
The electric box remained without a seal until the meter was replaced last year with the new smart meters.