Your Place: In cold weather, mice get into the dishwasher

Question: I live in a mature residential area not too far from a neighborhood park. For the last few years, when the weather reaches the low 20 degrees, field mice come in the house. Then they find their way into the dishwasher, of all places.

I have plugged up every hole in the house I could with every technique I have read or heard about, but they still get in. We do scrape and rinse the dishes, and in the morning I still find mouse feces in the bottom of the dishwasher. The plumber told us he not seen this in his 30 years in the business and thought it was so funny, he did not charge us. He suggested a new dishwasher.

Any suggestions?

Answer: In warm, rainy spring weather, many readers have reported ants in their dishwashers, but never mice. They are pretty flexible and if there is a way to change shape to get into a place they like, they'll come right in.

You'd be surprised at the number of people on the Internet who report having mice in their dishwashers. Most cite the Maytag Quiet Series models because of a plastic vent cover that the rodents repeatedly chewed through. Some have replaced the plastic cover with wire mesh and that has worked.

You have a GE Triton XL, and I could find no mention of a mouse problem for that brand and model anywhere.

You say your plumber suggested buying a new dishwasher and you are against it, because the one you have isn't broken. The way I see it, if your dishwasher has a mice problem that doesn't seem to want to go away, it is broken in a sense.

That's not saying that a newer model will keep the mice away, although you could look into ones that might be a bit more impenetrable.

Consider a professional exterminator to find exactly where the mice are coming in and see if he or she can stop them in their tracks.

Dishwasher tips. Not sure if this applies to the reader in a recent column who said the dishes were cloudy coming out of the dishwasher. I too wondered if I needed a new dishwasher, even though mine seems to work as well as ever. My glasses came out with a white film baked onto them, even without the dryer cycle turned on.

Recently I read an article in which many people wrote that they are noticing that their dishes, particularly clear glasswear, are coming out of the dishwasher coated with a white film, which doesn't rinse off.

According to the article, it is due to the dishwasher detergents, and not the dishwasher. The formula for the detergents has been changed to lower pollutants in our water.