Proper ventilation is essential for any home. Whether it’s air being drawn in through your soffits, into the attic, and out through the roof vents or outlets for appliances like a dryer or fireplace, keeping fresh, clean air is important for the health of the home and the homeowners alike.

Unfortunately, though, ventilation comes with tradeoffs. Ventilation means holes in your home, and holes in your home mean any number of unwelcome guests could creep through. From small or medium-sized animals to crawling, flying, and stinging insects, the last thing homeowners want is for outside wildlife to get inside the house.

The solution to keeping wildlife out comes in the form of exclusion products. And while there are plenty of great brands on the market, at HY-C, we manufacture HY-GUARD EXCLUSION: a line-up of wildlife control products engineered to keep critters out of your home while still allowing that all-important air circulation to take place.

But what kinds of products are in the line? How do they work? And what are they made of? In this guide, we’ll answer those questions (and more) to help familiarize you with what wildlife control products are and what they do. By the time you’re done, you’ll know exactly what kind of pests to keep out and how you can stop them from getting into your home.

What Kind of Wildlife Control Products Does HY-GUARD EXCLUSION Make?

HY-GUARD EXCLUSION products have multiple purposes and keep out all kinds of critters, but each product falls into one of three distinct categories:

1. Exclusion caps
2. Exclusion screens
3. Exclusion guards

Exclusion Caps

Exclusion caps are made exclusively to sit atop chimneys. There are two varieties of exclusion caps: chimney caps, and chimney guards. Chimney caps feature both a solid, metal top that keeps snow and rain out of your fireplace and mesh sides that still allow smoke and gasses to vent out as logs burn.

Exclusion guards are basically the same, but instead of a solid, metal top, they feature a mesh top (and mesh sides). These guards are typically used in areas with low precipitation that require spark arresting, a process in which the tight mesh “catches” sparks to prevent them from floating away into dry vegetation, potentially causing wildfires.

Both chimney caps and chimney guards come with mesh patterns that are tight enough to keep out local animals (and, if the mesh is tight enough, bees and wasps). These caps are often bolted on, preventing animals from ripping them off and making a home in your chimney.

Exclusion Screens

Exclusion screens are pretty straightforward: they come as a flat “sheet” with a solid, metal frame and a diamond mesh body. These screens go anywhere on your home that have a sizable opening — typically on a soffit or over an opening in the house’s foundation.

Like exclusion caps, exclusion screens are bolted into place, so curious animals won’t be able to rip them off and get inside. Depending on the tightness of the mesh, these screens can keep out decently sized insects, too.

Exclusion Guards

Finally, HY-GUARD EXCLUSION’s lineup also features a few different exclusion guards. These guards exist to cover vents from products that need to put out some kind of exhaust — products like dryers, fireplaces, or wood burning furnaces or stoves.

Exclusion guards are also bolted onto the house. They may be made from either plastic or metal. While metal is obviously stronger, even plastic guards are capable of withstanding the prying claws of a critter. A tight-meshed guards can keep out small critters or large insects.

Where on Your House do HY-GUARD EXCLUSION Products Go?

HY-GUARD EXCLUSION products quite literally cover everything from a home’s roof to its foundation. Whether the opening in the home exists for ventilation purposes or to service the exhaust needs of an appliance, there’s a cap, screen, or guard to cover it.

Chimneys

Starting at the highest point on the home, exclusion caps and guards are bolted onto chimney flues to keep animals out. While there are technically no chimney caps or guards under the HY-GUARD EXCLUSION name, other HY-C brands (like Shelter and Draft King) make chimney products engineered for wildlife control.

Roof Vents

Staying near the top of the house, HY-GUARD EXCLUSION manufactures an entire line of roof vent guards. The vents themselves allow air to circulate through a home’s attic while the guard keeps birds or dexterous mammals from getting into the attic and building their nests.

These roof vent guards are designed with swooping angles to look architecturally pleasing. They also come with pre-cut holes to accommodate screws that go directly into the roof’s shingles so the vent guard stays securely in place.

Soffits

Plenty of critters (especially raccoons) love to make their homes in soffits. Many soffits come with a layer of hardware cloth built in, but most animals have no trouble ripping off this flimsy mesh and climbing through to set up camp. HY-GUARD EXCLUSION’s soffit vent covers are made from galvanized steel, which is significantly harder for animals to gnaw or claw through.

Dryer Vents

The majority of vents that appear on the side of the house are dryer vents, and animals can get into them quite easily. HY-GUARD EXCLUSION’s dryer vent covers come either with diamond mesh or code-compliant, vertical bars to keep local animals out of your dryer vent hose.

Foundations

It’s important for an attic to breathe, and it’s important for a basement to breathe, too. To prevent stale air from gathering at the base of a home, some houses come equipped with foundation vents to promote circulation.

These areas are very vulnerable to bugs and critters, and HY-GUARD EXCLUSION’s foundation vent guards keep these intrusions out while still allowing airflow into the basement.

What Kinds of Wildlife do HY-GUARD EXCLUSION Products Exclude?

HY-GUARD EXCLUSION’s caps, screens, and guards are designed to keep out a large range of animals and insects based on the biodiversity of your local environment. The vast majority of the products are made with stainless steel mesh, and the size of each product’s mesh helps to determine what kind of animals or insects it will exclude from your home.

⅝” Mesh

The widest HY-GUARD EXCLUSION mesh option, ⅝” mesh will keep out larger intrusive animals. Some of the most commonly excluded are:

• Raccoons
• Opossums
• Squirrels
• Skunks
• Beavers
• Birds

It should be noted that bats and mice are not on this list. While ⅝” diamond mesh should keep mice and bats out of your house in theory, in practice, animals are sometimes determined to squeeze through tight spaces. At the end of the day, it is theoretically possible for a bat or a mouse to get through ⅝” diamond mesh.

⅜” Mesh

The next-tightest mesh option, ⅜” mesh represents the threshold at which mice and bats can no longer get in (but insects still can). This mesh size is commonly designed to keep out:

• Mice
• Bats
• Raccoons
• Opossums
• Squirrels
• Skunks
• Beavers
• Birds

¼” Mesh

Finally, at just 0.25” in length, this mesh size is engineered to exclude all the critters listed above (and other similarly sized animals) plus medium to large-sized insects. Some of the most common insects kept out by ¼” mesh include:

• Bees
• Wasps
• Yellow jackets
• Stink bugs

Keep in mind that while ¼” mesh does keep out some bigger invasive insects, smaller ones (like ants) can still make their way through the cracks.

Are HY-GUARD EXCLUSION Products Right for You?

Before now, you may not have even known about some of the spaces on your home that were vulnerable to insects and animals. After reading this, you may feel compelled to take a peek at your dryer vent, or to glance up at your soffit to see if it has any vents.

Depending on what you find, you may decide you want some exclusion screens or guards. After all, wildlife control products are designed to be preventative, keeping a bat colony out of your attic or a stink bug infestation out of your basement before it can even begin.

If you decide you want to keep animals and insects out of your house with wildlife control products, your next step should be to contact a wildlife control professional — they’re qualified and licensed to install products like HY-GUARD EXCLUSION.

Keep the ventilation spots we mentioned in mind — spaces like chimney openings, roof vents, soffit openings, dryer vents, and foundation vents. Ask a professional which of these are present on your home, and ask them to find the appropriate screens and guards to cover up these vulnerabilities.

After the installation is complete, you’ll be left with peace of mind and a clean, well-ventilated home that’s set up to minimize pest invasion and maximize comfort.

Raccoons, squirrels, birds, bats — at some point or another, you may encounter any one of these critters in your chimney. Their presence can disturb your living space, cause costly damage to your chimney or fireplace, and at worst, curious or frightened wildlife may find its way into the rest of your home.

HY-C’s HY-Guard exclusion products have been protecting homes from nuisance wildlife for decades, and our chimney caps have been on top of flues for over 75 years. In the category of keeping animals out of chimneys, there’s nothing we haven’t seen.

In this guide, we’ll outline how a chimney works, which animals get into them, and how they manage to sneak in. We’ll also explain how a good chimney cap can go a long way towards keeping critters out of your chimney to help you keep your chimney — and your home — protected.

Parts of a Chimney

It’s important to visualize the components that make up your chimney so you can see both where critters get in and where they set up camp. A traditional fireplace is made up of several components, including the firebox, a damper, a smoke shelf, a smoke chamber, the masonry, and a flue. A standard chimney typically looks something like this:

The firebox is what you see when you look into a fireplace from inside your home. Lined with firebrick, it’s where you burn the wood in your fireplace. The damper is an adjustable steel or cast iron plate at the top of the firebox, and its job is to regulate airflow through the firebox, into the smoke chamber, and up through the chimney. Behind the damper sits the smoke shelf — a flat area at the base of the smoke chamber designed to prevent reverse airflow (i.e., backdrafts) into the firebox. The smoke shelf also helps to protect the firebox from water, debris, or wildlife that makes its way down the chimney.

Atop the smoke chamber, the flue is the exit from which smoke and hot gas escape the chimney. It’s supported by the masonry of the chimney and it extends upward through the building, through the roofline, and ends at some level above the shingles.

The flue is the most common entry point wildlife uses to get inside a chimney, either intentionally to create a nest or by accidentally falling in. Critters may also enter the actual chimney structure through flaws in the masonry, missing mortar joints, or other external damage. Smaller wildlife can get in through openings at the base of the chimney if the flashing is faulty. Decay and extensive weathering on older chimneys may offer still more points of entry for local fauna.

What Kind of Wildlife Gets into a Chimney?

Raccoons are infamous for using the chimney as a maternal den site; a female raccoon can easily climb up and down the inside of a flue. Normally, a mother raccoon births her babies (called “kits”) on the smoke shelf of a fireplace, so that should be the first place you check if you hear critters in your chimney.

Squirrels, bats, and birds can also get into the flue. Unlike raccoons, squirrels can’t climb back up the slick flue tile, and bats and birds have trouble navigating the narrow smoke chamber. Chimney swifts are a notable exception, though. These aptly named birds can fly vertically and have no issues making their home in a chimney. Swifts are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and require special permits for removal.

In some cases, small animals might be able to enter through the cracks and crevices in the masonry or flue tiles. These infestations — usually flying squirrels or bats — are sometimes hard to recognize, but typically easy to exclude with regular maintenance.

What Are the Signs of Wildlife in Your Chimney?

There are two sure signs of wildlife inside a chimney: noises and odors. Noises like scratching, clawing, or just general movement indicate that there may be an animal on top of the damper or the smoke shelf. If the damper was left open, the culprit will likely be staring you in the face from your firebox (or even running around your living room). Chirps or chittering are usually indicative of birds or raccoons.

Odor normally suggests raccoons as well, but most homeowners can pick up the scent of a long-term bird roost and the droppings that come with it. If the odor is particularly foul, the critter may not have survived its time in your chimney. In this case, your priority shifts from animal capture to carcass removal.

How to Inspect Your Chimney for Wildlife

Starting an inspection is easy enough; all you need is a flashlight to peek into the firebox to check for wildlife. Inspecting the smoke shelf is a little more difficult. Visual access to the shelf is difficult, so you’ll need both a light and a camera. From the roof, you can use a strong light source and look down the chimney flue for critters, or you can lower a camera down the flue and play the footage back later. It’s important to note that we do not recommend climbing onto your roof. Leave all roof-level inspections to a professional wildlife control operator.

As the flue is being inspected for wildlife and nesting material, be sure to inspect the chimney itself for any signs of damage, blockage, cracks, weathering, or creosote buildup. Repairing these problems will not only keep future wildlife from getting in, but will also ensure an efficient chimney that functions properly. To really keep wildlife out of your chimney, though, nothing beats a top-of-the-line chimney cap.

How a Chimney Cap Can Keep Wildlife out of Your Chimney

If you don’t have a chimney cap, getting one is an absolute necessity. First and foremost, they keep animals and debris from entering the chimney flue and creating blockages and fire hazards. They also prevent downdrafts and rainwater from getting into the chimney flue.

A chimney cap can also improve the chimney’s draft, helping it to vent smoke and gas more easily. Caps made from galvanized steel, stainless steel, or copper are popular choices because they are aesthetically pleasing, and because nuisance wildlife can’t gnaw through them or rip them off the flue.

It’s important to consider the mesh size of your chimney cap, too. ¾” mesh is common on most caps, but homes in some parts of Oregon and California require ⅝” mesh by law (to stop sparks from escaping and causing forest fires). Mesh size is a balancing act; the mesh needs to be small enough to prevent small animals from accessing the flue, but large enough to allow smoke and gas to escape to stop creosote from building up or ice from forming.

Keep Wildlife out of Your Chimney

The idea of an unwelcome animal making a home in your chimney is unsettling. By now, though, you understand how your chimney works, what kind of animals tend to get into it, how to check for those animals, and how to keep them from accessing your flue in the future.

The best thing to do now is to find the right chimney cap with the best functions and the right aesthetic for your home. Once it’s in place, you won’t have to worry about a family of raccoons living on your smoke shelf anymore.