Pest control FAQ

Droppings settle it. Mouse droppings are the size of a grain of rice and pointed at both ends; rat droppings are the size of a raisin and blunter. Sound helps too — a rat is heavy enough that you hear it move across a ceiling, where a mouse mostly scratches. It matters, because a mouse trap will not kill a rat.

More than feels reasonable. Six is a sensible minimum for a single room and a dozen for a kitchen with a real infestation. Trapping is a numbers problem, and the most common reason a campaign fails is that somebody set two traps and waited a week.

A pea-sized smear of peanut butter pressed into the trigger works in most homes. The size matters more than the flavor: a large bait lets a mouse feed around the trigger without firing it. Nesting material — a scrap of cotton wool — often out-performs food in cold weather.

Almost always because the trap is new and the rat is avoiding it. Rats are neophobic. Leave traps out, baited and unset, for three to five nights, then arm them all on the same night. The second most common cause is placing traps in open floor instead of tight against a wall or joist.

Not for clearing an infestation. Extension testing does not support the claim that ultrasound drives established rodents out of a building, and any effect tends to fade as the animals habituate. Our page on ultrasonic repellers goes through what the published work actually found.

Barely. Mosquitoes find you by carbon dioxide and body heat, not by ultraviolet light. University of Florida extension reported that out of roughly 10,000 insects killed by a zapper in a one-night test, only eight were mosquitoes. Zappers are good at moths and nuisance flies, which is a different job.

Removing standing water, and treating water you cannot remove with a BTI larvicide. Mosquitoes breed close to where they bite, so the mosquitoes in a suburban yard are usually that yard's own. Traps and repellents manage the adults that are already flying; larval control is what lowers the number.

The three usual answers are the kitchen drain, the recycling bin, and a forgotten onion or potato at the back of a cupboard. All three hold the fermenting residue fruit flies breed in, and none of them looks like a fruit problem.

No, and the difference decides the fix. Fruit flies are tan with red eyes and hover near fruit and bins. Fungus gnats are dark and delicate and come off wet houseplant soil. Drain flies are fuzzy and moth-like and sit still on the wall near a sink. Each breeds somewhere different.

An enclosed trap, where the mechanism sits inside a sealed chamber, or an electronic trap whose shock plates are deep inside a tunnel a nose cannot enter. Both are safe because of their geometry rather than because of where you put them — which is the distinction that matters.

No. Even bait sold as lower-risk still poisons an animal that eats the rodent afterwards, and second-generation anticoagulants persist in the liver long enough for that to matter. A locked station loaded with snap traps gives the same placement advantage with none of the secondary risk.

As a kill method, no. They are indiscriminate — they catch lizards, songbirds and kittens as readily as mice — and death by exhaustion on a board is slow. They have one legitimate use: sliding one under an appliance to confirm where rodents travel before you set real traps.

With enough traps set on real runways, most of the catching happens in the first three to five nights. If you are still catching after two weeks, mice are coming in from outside and you have an exclusion problem rather than a trapping problem.

Two to three days once the breeding site is gone. If they are still there after a week, something is still producing them — look again at the drain, the recycling bin and the bottom of the fruit bowl.

The CDC lists DEET, picaridin, IR3535, oil of lemon eucalyptus, PMD and 2-undecanone as registered actives, and notes that DEET and picaridin protect for longest. Oil of lemon eucalyptus is the only botanical on that list, and its label says it is not for children under three.

In one narrow case. Botanical pouches can help keep mice out of a sealed, unoccupied space — a stored vehicle, a cabin, a closed drawer. They will not drive out mice already nesting in a wall, and in an open room they dilute to nothing.

No, and we will not pretend otherwise. Picks come from the manufacturer's own specifications, the pattern across large numbers of verified buyer reviews, and published university extension guidance — and from ruling out products whose marketing does not survive that reading.

Because we will only show a price that can be pulled live from the retailer with the date it was checked attached. The live price feed is built and wired in but not switched on yet, so every button reads Check price on Amazon. A stale price that looks authoritative is worse than no price.

No. We have no verified ratings data of our own, so publishing a score would mean inventing one. The comparison tables carry mechanism, coverage, running cost and safety design instead — the things that actually decide which product suits your situation.

A structural rat colony inside walls, a large droppings clean-up in an unventilated crawl space, an infestation that returns within weeks of every treatment, or any pest situation in a home with someone immunocompromised. This site is about doing it yourself, which is exactly why it should say when not to.