Evidence of mice in my kitchen- do those electrical pest control things work?

[mipmop]

It's a fitted kitchen. I had to remove a base board and found loads of mouse droppings behind the base board. I moved here recently and the previous owners did no maintenance or cleaning, so the droppings could have been there for years or could be recent. Who knows?

Anyway, I thought maybe I should get one of those electrical devices you plug into the wall which emit a high-pitched noise. Any thoughts?

Sorry - we rented a place that turned out to have mice. We bought one of those electronic devices - it was useless.

My advice would be not to try to deal with this yourself - after weeks of futile and gross efforts with traps etc we called a pest control company. 2 visits from them and we were mice free.

Hope this helps - good luck

Get a cat. Or encourage a neighbours cat to spend time in your house.

Otherwise it doesn't matter what you do. They just come back.

No. They don't work. We've tried loads of different traps etc. but the only thing that got rid of them was poison behind the kick boards in the kitchen. There was no smell either.

Thanks. I'm hoping that the droppings have been there for years and the mice are long gone, so the plug-in thing would be a deterrent... I shall put on my big girl pants and check behind the base board again tomorrow. (Really hoping no more droppings appear.)

This was not in the estate agent's blurb!

I hope no more droppings appear!

As you have seen no others elsewhere in the house, at least the areas they can reach is contained. Poison might be your best bet to deal with a specific place.

You can clean out behind the kick boards, and under the sink, and gehind appliances, and put numerous little baits down. I use tge smallest size of plant-pot saucer in bright red. Fill them with rat and mouse grains and level the surface, push them to the back out of reach.

Look at them with a torch weekly. If the level goes down, top them up and keep topping until they stay full. Then check when you remember.

Get a good large container of the bait. The rat poison packs by Rentokil are quite big.

You can also get waxy blocks that withstand damp but cost more.

I bought one from Amazon after we had an infestation last year, and haven't seen any since, but not had another winter yet.

However we used snap traps to get rid of the ones we had in the first place. Apparently if you get one it won't send the ones you've already got packing. We used easy to set and release traps like this one so we didn't have to touch the dead mice.

www.amazon.co.uk/Piece-Mouse-reusable-catch-those/dp/B000QF976M/ref=sr_1_39?s=outdoors&ie=UTF8&qid=1404650082&sr=1-39&keywords=Mouse+trap

I'd deal with it straight away, I was so freaked out when I found some nibbled packets in my kitchen I refused to go in there until dealt with. Check if your council does pest control. Ours only cost 10 quid for 2 visits, including bait and special boxes. Really knowledgeable guy, and they would be able to tell you if there's an "active" population. They might need to put the poison down and see if it gets "nibbled" first

Thanks everyone for your responses. I hadn't considered that the council might be able to help.

Well the good news is that the area which had the mouse droppings was checked today and remains clean. There were no other signs of them apart from in that one place. I'm drawn toward thinking (hoping) that they disappeared years ago and the previous people living here just haven't cleaned that area. I will keep checking the suspect area and then decide what to do. If there's no sign of them soon I'll probably just seal the gaps and maybe buy the electric doodah.