Rodent Prevention in Shop

I would keep the insulation except for the stuff they have been nesting in but seal up the walls so nothing can get in there. I would try to get on top of the rodent situation by trapping or maybe invest in a shop cat. Once they are gone a cat will keep it that way.

-- Bondo Gaposis

Shop help. Especially the feline sort.

I have five, all specialists in their particular fields of endeavor:
One catches birds that get in.
One catches mice and rats.
One specializes in Palmetto bugs aka: Water Roaches, Oriental Roaches, etc….. you know them if you are from the south, monster sized roaches that get everywhere.
One makes sure all the equipment is working properly, usually while I am using it. Lately I have had to bar her from making inspections while the saws are running.
One catches snakes. She has caught snakes since she first adopted us 4 years ago. She doesn’t care what kind, rattler, cotton mouth, coral, copperhead, chicken snake, coachwhip, blue racer, etc….. she just picks them up in her mouth and takes them down to the creek, plays with them for a few minutes and lets them go.

Get rid of all the insulation in my opinion. It has rodent scent in it, no matter what and they will always come back to that.
You’ll have a difficult time keeping critters out unless you put a decent sweep under the garage door and cover all the other entrance holes with metal.

On the shop itself:
If you don’t provide a controlled environment inside your shop, your cast iron and steel tools will rust. It doesn’t need to be heated but it does need to have the humidity controlled.
Insulate, insulate, insulate! When you have as much as you think you need> Insulate some more!
It doesn’t matter if where you live get’s hot in the summer or cold in the winter…. with temp and humidity variance, most shops will be cooler in the morning when the sun comes up and any moisture in the air will condense on surfaces everywhere. Even on drywall, which may or may not cause mold eventually, not to mention making the moisture content of your lumber to rise and fall, making it swell, shrink, warp, bow, crown and turn into a pretzel.

-- Improvise.... Adapt...... Overcome!

The house I live in has an old garage that was a rat hotel. Took 2 weekends of pulling everything out and what was contaminated was either trashed or washed down with strong bleach solution and wire brushed. Luckily, I live with 6 others and we tackled the problem as a group. One thing that has helped enormously is to seal all holes with wire mesh. Larger openings had concrete board or plate glass attached (rodents don’t chew glass). It’s amazing how small an opening they can squeeze through. Funny thing is that we found a bunch of different brands of rat poison wrappers/boxes in a corner. We never baited using these brands (at least 3 different brands)- they apparently drug them in from neighbors garages/basements as part of their food cache and ate the bait at their leisure in our garage.

-- "After a year of doing general farmwork, it was quite clear to me that chickens and I were not compatible"-George Nakashima

I had a similar issue at my last house. I tore out every inch of insulation then used that foam insulation that comes in a can to seal up every crack along the walls from floir to ceiling. Never had any other problems.

Good luck.

-- "Our past judges our present." JFK - 1962; American Heritage Magazine

As mentioned above, pull the insulation. Then take a cheap pump up garden sprayer and fill it with a 50/50 mix of bleach and water, and spray the place down real good. Fill cracks, voids, etc. and re-insulate. Stop by a sporting goods store and pick up a good Co2 pellet pistol, get some cheap cheeze for bait, and a bottle of JD, then sit and wait for the little pizzers to come back.

-- Bill, central NY...no where near the "big apple"