Originally Posted By: PeterPolyol
Originally Posted By: pkunk
I've had a mouse problem on and off for years as do my neighbors. Irish Spring is food, dryer sheets are nesting material, mothballs will bother you more than them. Peppermint oil (the good stuff) can work short term but the mouse scent trails are hard to find for us mere mortals. The only thing that has worked continuously for us is surrounding the vehicles with LED rope lights on a dawn to dusk timer. My cats keep the population down but they can't get them all. poison works but is bad for the cats and again doesn't kill all of them before they do damage. Check the valley pan under the intake manifold as well as the filter housing.
I'll have to second this. Even the 1+million scoville peppers didn't bother them. Cats do nothing. We have a bunch of stray cats around and these rats are too big for them, some even resembling squirrels.
These things are a real curse, we've been leaving the hoods open about a foot and if you make one mistake and skip a day, say goodbye to your ignition wires. All leaving the hood open seemed to do was relocate their toilet from the engine to the inside of the car. Eating the ABS wiring harness to enter the vehicle is just par for the course. Last winter the battery died because the rats cut the alternator voltage regulator signal wire.
They've generally minded their own business for the past decade or so but the past couple of years have been insane. They nested in the rear quarter panels of a car that was parked for 6 months. The amount of [censored] and [censored] they left in there nearly ruined the entire car. Every single piece of interior paneling had to be removed to extract it, and I was dry heaving the entire process. Rats, while I know they're completely ignorant to the damage they're causing, just HAVE TO POOP on everything, poop as they walk, poop all over the valve covers, just poop like a machine gun all over everything. And they always seem ultra freaking determined to only go into the deepest crevice of an engine to poop and cause the damage there. A handful of ignition wire sets and alternator regulator wires are one thing, but going deep into the Vee of the engine tp fill with poop and then top it off by severing the knock sensor wire at the very base, to make sure you can't repair it after you tear the intake manifold and coolant pipes off is infuriating. Doing all that work is worth it though, to disable poop and [censored] aromatherapy vaporizer they got going on there,
Heavens forbid they could step one foot on the 10 glue traps. Last week I set little trays of antifreeze concentrate on the intake manifold (expensive Rotella ELC), where only the rats would go and they seemed to like it. The next day one or two were puking blood. Since then, no takers in fact the little dastards had the nerve to rebuild the kleenex nest around the antifreeze. Some of them still broke into the car and built a nest on the drivers side floor with kleenex, again. As for the V6 valley, I stuffed it with stainless steel scouring pads, let's see them gnarl that up for nesting material they might find themselves with bleeding gums.... or not. The rat mouth is probably somehow resistant to that too.
The persistent smell of roasting rat poo haunts me each day
Go to the nearest farm supply and get some real poison and set up some feeding stations.
We use something like this but in an inverted T, hanging wire down from the theaded cap with 7 or 8 chunks of poison threaded on it.
http://www.publichealth.lacounty.gov/eh/docs/Specialized/Vector_Management/plastic_Pipe.pdf
We had dozens of rats at one point and now have zero as far as I can tell. Our cats and dogs haven't had an issue from the poison either, as most rats seem to hide somewhere to die.