About 12 years ago, I was having a major problem with red squirrels chewing 5/16 lines and main lines at my sugar house woods. My son and a friend volunteered to give me a hand with shooting the squirrels with pellet guns. My sugar house is in an area of town that is a no shooting zone. In 2 and a half weeks they shot 93 squirrels. That put an end to 98% of my squirrel chews. Since that time, I have used peanut butter baited rat traps to keep the red squirrel population under control. I keep the rat traps in 3 different areas of my woods with more conifers. I get one every now and then, just enough to hardly ever have any squirrel chews. Kind of a pain keeping the traps baited, but I just visit them every now and then and renew the bait and possibly empty a body.
The strange thing about my squirrel issue at my sugar house woods is that at my newer 7 year old remote woods 4 miles away on about 40 acres with 2,300 taps, is that I have literarily had 2 or 3 squirrel chews in all that time. And there is quite a big population of red squirrels in those woods. Must not be in their DNA to chew poly. However to make up for no squirrel problems, I have fishers and deer that chew 200-300 drops and a lot of 5/16 lines every season. During last seasons repair, I used 160-170 coupling on chewed or chopped off lines.
Joe
2004- 470 taps on gravity and buckets
2006- 590 taps on gravity and buckets 300 gph RO
2009- 845 taps on vacuum no buckets, 600 gph RO
2010- 925 taps on vacuum new 2 stage vacuum pump
2014- 3045 taps on vacuum, new 1200 gph RO
2015- 3104 taps on vacuum
2017- 3213 taps on vacuum
3' x 10' oil fired evaporator with steamaway