Like all animals, rats and mice are opportunists, they seek food and shelter, so if they have an opportunity to enter your home in search of food they will do so. Although most of us have no problem sharing our wider environment with these rodents, it is not a good idea to have them in your house. Apart from stealing your food, the main dangers from rodents are that they can spread some very unpleasant diseases and that they can chew their way through your possessions and through critical parts of your house’s infrastructure.
Houses – especially older ones – are often not perfectly sealed and rodents do get in. At Pest Wizards, we frequently assess problems like this and rid customers of their unwanted rodent visitors. It takes us around four visits to lay traps and bait, return to check and bait the traps a second and third time before finally signing off the job and removing all our equipment. When Pest Wizards carry out a pest treatment of this kind, we leave motion-sensor cameras on site so we can monitor the traps to see if there is any activity. That way we can be sure that there are never any animals suffering in the traps.
Although we can – and do – successfully remove rodents from customers homes every day, the best scenario is for the rodents not to get in to you house in the first place. Old houses can have many access points for rodents in all sorts of places – cracks in walls and holes under floors among others and so rodent proofing these properties properly can be a real challenge. Pest Wizards carry out surveys and then proofing on these types of houses and it can be done successfully.
Newer properties are built better and there are less obvious ways for rats and mice to get into the house. The walls and floors are generally made of concrete and are solid right down to the footings. The main entrance route for rats and mice is where services go in and out of the building. Sometimes there are gaps left where holes are drilled for pipes or wires and the hole isn’t sealed around the pipe properly. Pest Wizards do lots of work to fill in these gaps and ‘pest proof’ your house.
The most common way for rats to get into a modern house is via the drains. Rats are famously drawn to drains because they are warm and allow easy and convenient passage between houses. Drains very often develop cracks and breaks that allow rats to get from the drain to the underside of a house and from there it’s usually possible for them to find a route up into the house via a cavity wall or a riser. Pest Wizards have invested in drain survey equipment so that we can put a camera down your drain to find any evidence of rat activity and to try to work out where rats are getting into your house. If we identify evidence of rat activity, we can fit a non-return valve or rat flap as they are also known to stop rats entering that branch of your sewer. Our aim is always to stop you having a repeat of the problem in the future.
When it comes to rats being a problem in your garden there is obviously no way to rid rats completely from an outdoor area because they can move around freely. But there are certainly things that you can do to minimise the number of rats present and to stop them from being a problem. Rats spend most of their time seeking out food so the way to make them go away is not to have any source for food for them to find. The two most common sources of food in our gardens are from what we throw away and from what we might leave out to feed the birds and other wildlife. Modern plastic bins are usually strong and secure enough to keep out rats so if all food is neatly secured in the bin and not left lying around then that is not a problem. If food is thrown on a compost heap this can sometimes attract rats and so this should be avoided. When it comes to feeding the birds, any food dropped on the floor will be a problem plus rats are excellent climbers and can climb to reach feeders. The best answer is to not put any bird food where you don’t want rats but if that is felt to be unavoidable then the next best answer is to use a special birdfeeder designed to avoid the problem of spilt food.
Good management and a well-maintained house are the answer to avoiding rodent problems.
