What To Do If You Find A Snake In Your Air Conditioner

You don't have to be a herpetophobe to be repulsed at the idea of a snake living in your window air conditioner, but if you do happen to have an extreme fear of snakes and reptiles, it's the stuff of nightmares. Chances are your fear is misplaced, because any snake small enough to crawl through your air conditioner is probably harmless. It's still best to play it safe and get help, even if you aren't afraid of snakes. Even small snakes could be juveniles of a venomous species. 

If you have a central A/C unit or heat pump, it has an outdoor compressor unit large enough for big snakes to crawl under or inside. To remove a snake, call a professional for help. A wildlife expert can nab the snake and move it to a safe location away from your home.

Snakes are unwanted intruders, but they aren't pests in the same way that insects or rodents are. Most of the time, there's only one, and it's just looking for a safe place — preferably with water — to hang out. There's no reason to kill it, even if it scares you, but you do need to get it out of the air conditioner, and that's a job for an animal control expert. 

It's important to prevent snakes from getting into air conditioners in the first place, so check the area around the unit to see where and how the snake got in. If you find a snake in your window air conditioner, it could have climbed on foliage close to the house or along a gutter to reach it. Now your job is to cut back the foliage and put wire mesh barriers on the gutters. You should also seal gaps around the perimeter of the air conditioner through which a snake could crawl. 

Although it's more unusual, you could find a snake inside the indoor part of a mini-split system. That means there's a gap somewhere and it's probably the hole in the siding through which the refrigeration tubes pass. Seal around the tubes with silicone caulk, both inside and outside the house, to prevent this from happening again. If you have a ducted air conditioning system, check the ducts regularly for small openings and seal them.

Snakes are especially attracted to air conditioning systems during hot, dry weather, because of the condensation. A small, agile snake can even crawl through the drainage port, where it could cause a backup. It's hard to prevent this, but if you inspect the air conditioner whenever you notice a backup, you can hopefully find the snake that caused it before it winds up in another part of the house.