This is from my experience with mice getting into our house over a couple winters, rather than our TM, but it should be applicable.
The list of what does NOT work is practically endless. Sonic repellers, dryer sheets, various essential oils, special spray-foam opening sealants, and so forth. I have found steel wool to be marginally effective, because the mice can sometimes work around the edges of it, or push it aside.
Once they are inside, the only real treatments seem to be what you have discovered - poison baits and traps. And then you are left with the damage, as well as endless mouse nuggets everywhere.
The best - and perhaps only - approach is also what you are describing. Don't let them get in. My experience is that they cannot get through 1/4-inch hardware cloth, aka galvanized screen, if the edges of the screen can't be lifted or moved. The stuff is cheap at the hardware store, easily cut with metal snips, easily formed into any needed shape. The trick is sometimes finding a way to fasten it over the opening you are trying to seal.
For example, the air conditioner is easy to seal by forming a big piece of screen into a box that is big enough to drop over the A/C. Then weight it down with a few bricks around the edge. The furnace intake/exhaust panel can be handled in a similar way - you may have to fasten it in place by backing the screws out of the panel, then screwing them back in through the screen. At the factory, openings under the TM are often sealed with fiberglass screen, no challenge to a mouse. Cut a patch of screen that is big enough to cover the opening, and screw it to the underside of the floor. Openings around pipes can be sealed by cutting a patch that is bigger than the opening, then cutting out the center of the patch so it will fit tightly around the pipe. Make the circular cutout a bit smaller than the pipe, so you can bend the edges of the cutout down into the mouse's entry path - the ends of the cut wire are sharp! Cut through the patch from an edge to the circular opening so you can slip it around the pipe. Fasten it in place with a stainless steel hose clamp. And so forth. It takes some ingenuity. The wheel wells will probably be trickiest.
Good luck.
Bill
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