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Original poster

The mice are winning. Any advice?

148 replies

User534 · 01/04/2023 09:54

We have a mouse infestation. There are droppings. I put a humane mouse trap near the droppings and caught about 10 mice and released them a long way away. Fine. Then the mice learned how to get out of the humane mouse trap. I don't know whether they chatted with each other about how to do this. I caught one of them in the trap, repeatedly hurling itself at the entrance side until it almost managed to get it to open enough for the mouse to slip through. I got that mouse, but others have taken the bait and forced their way out of the trap. So I got two of the killing traps and put them down. This morning the bait had gone from both traps. One trap was open and the other had sprung, but the mouse got away.
Should I move on to poison now? Won't that lead to horrible scenes of dead and dying and decomposing mice all over the house, including under the floorboards and in the ceilings?

OP posts:
MyGrandmaLizzie · 03/04/2023 22:40

DH bought some fine gauge mesh which he cut to size and then used a glue gun to fix the mesh over the air bricks.

Nat6999 · 03/04/2023 22:49

Buy a drum of the cheap blue pellets bait, find every place they are getting in your rooms & put bait in the holes then block them with wire wool, I used basics pan scrubbers. Then go right round the outside of your home & block any holes with cement, that includes any cables for Sky or your TV aerial. Keep all food in sealable containers, empty the crumb tray for your toaster, nothing worse than toasted mouse! If you have any overgrown area in your garden or adjoining your house, get it cleared. I did all that & was mouse free in a week, I bought my pellets from a local Nisa shop, I had tried the rentokil stuff which cost a fortune but didn't work. Also keep on moving furniture, rodents don't like their environment moving around & put peppermint oil down to keep them away.

musicforthesoul · 03/04/2023 22:55

If you're going to use poison you need to put the cat in a cattery until you're done, it's no use just putting poison down in a room the cat can't get in. If she catches a mouse that's ingested the poison it could kill her too.

Socrateswasrightaboutvoting · 03/04/2023 22:56

Pest control or glue traps used in a more humane manner. Once the mouse is stuck on the glue trap take it a sufficient distance from the house pour cooking oil along one side of the mouse and leave/watch. Once the mouse has freed itself don't leave the glue trap where you have released the mouse, bin it, otherwise other insects or wildlife will get caught. In less that 10 minutes most mice have released themselves from the mat. Our humane traps, no matter what we put in them did not work, peanut butter, nutella etc. Glue traps were the only things that did. It took a couple of weeks but we have not a problem since. If ever we get the odd mouse, the glue traps go down again. We also foamed around every pipe and exterior gap possible.

I have no doubt that it is stressful for the period the mouse is such on the trap, but at least they are not dead.

boschbabe · 03/04/2023 22:59

Council pest control were useless in our case. Hadn’t a clue!
We then paid for a private one and he gave us suggestions we could implement ourselves.

  1. wire mesh over air bricks
  2. filling every gap in house with steel wool especially around radiators, floors etc
  3. the snap traps only worked for so long. We had mice between the floors. What finally worked was opening the sachets of the blue poison. Emptying onto two paper plates, placing one at each side of loft cupboard in eaves, went on holiday for two weeks and came back to no mice. We live in a terrace and they were moving between the attics (probably for years) but we converted our loft and became aware of them.
  4. They did return and used snap traps and poison again. One or more died under en suite floor in loft and it did stink for about a week.
good luck. It’s awful lying in bed at night listening to them running around above you. We had bought the glue traps as a last resort as this was going on for months but never needed them. I can’t underestimate how stressful it was for us so inhumane or not, the glue traps were our next option.
Nat6999 · 03/04/2023 23:01

Get a ratting dog, if you want to know how they work you can watch them on YouTube, I've watched 3 or 4 catch 200+ rats in under an hour.

SarahSays1 · 03/04/2023 23:09

@User534 The sonic deterrents can give some people earache or headache. best avoided. (And before anyone says they can't hear them - some children can hear some of them as they have better higher frequency hearing, and even for the people who can't hear them, their ear drum and parts of their inner ear are still moving very quickly as a result of the sound vibrations, so there is logic that they could be affected in some way if they are in the vicinity of the sound source)

Make sure you have wire wool in all ventilation bricks and even the tiniest cracks, this should help to keep the mice out.

carly2803 · 03/04/2023 23:14

proper pest control = pay someone!!

also yes - get a cat, we had rats, got cats, we no longer have any vermin house cats too they dont go out

Original poster
User534 · 04/04/2023 01:37

Thanks for the advice about wire mesh etc. A problem we have is that there's a wood patio, raised above ground level. So you can't access a large area beneath it. And that's where the slugs get in and up into the kitchen. I hate to think what's going on under the patio, but short of a major re-design...

OP posts:
WiddlinDiddlin · 04/04/2023 04:57

Ah... decking.

Beloved of rats and mice (and slugs) since the early 1990s. Get rid of it or if you must have it, fit access hatches so you can put down traps/poison.

I took a couple of our dogs next door when they got rid of a crappy lean-to 'conservatory' and decking area (at their invitation)... 27 rats. 6 mice. And thats the ones they didn't miss, quite a few got away as well and I am fairly sure someone swallowed a mouse whole - ugh. Going by the detritus under there it had been a ratty paradise for decades.

Fenella123 · 07/04/2023 21:45

Well that's why I NOW have a tidy garage and loft.
And why I don't have decking.
And why the climber on the outside of the house had to go (the rosy cheeked, tweed clad pest controller said the mice might be running up it to the eaves and getting in that way.

They are such small things, and yet, you cannot be half-assed about combating them, it just doesn't work.

Aria999 · 08/04/2023 01:32

User534 · 04/04/2023 01:37

Thanks for the advice about wire mesh etc. A problem we have is that there's a wood patio, raised above ground level. So you can't access a large area beneath it. And that's where the slugs get in and up into the kitchen. I hate to think what's going on under the patio, but short of a major re-design...

We have this too.

So far the sonic things plus mouse repellent spray round the outside of the house (and seriously sloshed into the under decking area) seem to have produced a hiatus in mouse symptoms.

We are about 5 days in so still not confident!

Original poster
User534 · 08/04/2023 11:47

I have to say that what a poster has said about what in her experience was lurking under the decking has traumatised me... It's a large area of decking, which was of course already there when we bought the house. I hate not being able to see what's under it, especially as there's an outdoor drain down there. On the other hand, I'm not sure I can face the prospect of ripping it out, and it's very hard to find tradesmen to do that kind of thing these days. I don't happen to have a couple of rat-catching dogs to hand, only the one increasingly harmless cat.

OP posts:
Original poster
User534 · 08/04/2023 11:48

I've been looking into mouse traps on Amazon, and there are lots of reviews about the traps not killing the mouse (which was my experience). So this has put me off using those now.

OP posts:
ScribblingPixie · 08/04/2023 11:49

I had success with clove oil. Soaked cotton wool pads with it and put them behind cupboards etc, everywhere that the mice went. Renewed every few days. Problem disappeared.

Pulpfan78 · 08/04/2023 12:54

I'm a mouse expert (wish I wasn't) and tried everything. You need poison. Glue traps work but are cruel. Then block up areas. Humane traps are rubbish. Snap traps can be evaded. Our mice would walk past and sniff the sonar things. The electric shock things killed one. Poison killed about 50. Just bin the corpes.

Pulpfan78 · 08/04/2023 12:55

User534 · 08/04/2023 11:48

I've been looking into mouse traps on Amazon, and there are lots of reviews about the traps not killing the mouse (which was my experience). So this has put me off using those now.

Exactly my experience. You'd hear a snap and there would be a half trapped mouse carrying it round. So grim.

Pulpfan78 · 08/04/2023 12:57

Seriously, everything humane - peppermint etc - did NOTHING.

Original poster
User534 · 08/04/2023 13:10

ScribblingPixie · 08/04/2023 11:49

I had success with clove oil. Soaked cotton wool pads with it and put them behind cupboards etc, everywhere that the mice went. Renewed every few days. Problem disappeared.

So are you saying that the mice left your house and found a totally new place to live? My worry is that they would simply find a completely inaccessible part of the house and do havoc there with chewing up electric cables and so on, away from any traps or poison.

OP posts:
Original poster
User534 · 08/04/2023 13:10

I'm confused by people saying they had mice in their attic / eaves. Don't the mice actually want to live somewhere where they have access to food?

OP posts:
Fenella123 · 08/04/2023 13:13

Well they can get out of the house the same way they got in. Go get any food and drink they can't find. But bear in mind mice may be in the attic when you HEAR them and in your kitchen later on when you don't!

Empressofall · 08/04/2023 15:12

We also have an infestation- all because of our awful neighbours. The whole row has them. We are furious.
We initially went the humane way but now we've gone full on nuclear. We have a newborn. E comes first. We've sealed up any entrances/holes. All food is in plastic containers. Bins are disinfected 4 times a week (previously was only 2).
Don't worry about being humane. These things carry diseases. Borrowing a cat also won't help. That's a myth. You'd probably be better off with a dog.
Get Rentokil in. We did and i highly recommend. They used something called contact poison. Ansolutely amazing.
When the mice die, you'll smell gas. You can choose to take the floorboards up and dispose or you can have rentokil do it for you. The corpses dry out quite quickly.
Good luck!

ScribblingPixie · 08/04/2023 16:49

User534 · 08/04/2023 13:10

So are you saying that the mice left your house and found a totally new place to live? My worry is that they would simply find a completely inaccessible part of the house and do havoc there with chewing up electric cables and so on, away from any traps or poison.

Show quote history

Well, we're in a flat so it's quite possible that we've passed the problem on to a neighbour. I think it you go crazy with it and you're leaving doors and windows open as it gets warmer they'd be likely to leave altogether. That's just based on our experience anyway.

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