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Is Untrasonic Electronic Pest Control, Effective?
tedgyz asks: "I have declared war on the pests in my house. I am tired of hearing the scurrying of mice and squirrels in my walls. Worse - I am tired of the nests littered with droppings buried in boxes in the attic. I have used standard traps, and although successful, it seems that new rodents or more than happy to replace the ones I've killed. Are ultrasonic deterrents effective?"
"I've searched the web, but I can only find marketing material from manufacturers and distributors. I'm looking for cold, hard facts.
- Do ultrasonic deterrents really keep rodents out of your house?
- What is the range?
- Do they last, or do the rodents eventually return?
- Are they truly innocuous to dogs and cats?
- How do you measure success?"
Untrasonic Pest Control, Effective? You butchered the headline!
Yawn.
What is this "Untrasonic" technology you speak of? Some kind of super-sonic, but not quite super-sonic frequency perhaps?
Ladies, form queue here -->
Pedant.
I do know that those pest repellers can drive me out of a room pretty quickly.
Whenever I get near one I get a horrible headache after a few seconds that just keeps getting worse and worse until I flee, or can disable the damned device.
My advice would be to avoid them. Never let one into your house or workplace, destroy any you find, and try to drive the companies that make them out of business, sterilize the ground on which the factories that built them once stood (after your burn the buildings, and before you salt the ashes), and force the people who invented/built them into a lonely exile in Antarctica.
Of course, I might be slightly biased.
Who knows? Probably not. I vaguely remember a Choice magazine article on them showing no statistically provable difference. Wait, maybe that was the EMP type ones.
Some of those ads are a bit worrying - "Drive pests away by creating a unbearable ultrasonic field plus an annoying EMP in your house wiring!"
I think that having anything in your house that causes discomfort to animals that are *still* genetically fairly close to humans is probably a bad thing. Doubly so for the EMP ones. After all, a lot of human trials start out on the humble lab rat.
I wouldn't be convinced until there was a long term and scientifically rigorous study on continuous exposure to humans (oh, and the pests you're trying to drive off too!).
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
A couple of years ago I moved into a house in the country, which was full of mice. The previous occupants had laid down traps and poison, to no avail.
Shortly after moving in we got ourselves two kittens, just weaned. By the time they were six months old there were no more mice! Any new would-be immigrants get dealt with by the time they reach the garden. We are also free from rats, moles, voles, shrews and anything else that moves. Pretty much as you would expect!
The secret is not to overfeed them so they stay healthy, agile and a little bit hungry most of the time.
They're also very nice cats as it happens, very loyal, affectionate and playful. They're always goofing around and making us laugh. It feels like they're part of the family.
They do work in certain cases -- I have two in my house (kitchen and computer room), and they have stopped my mouse problem.
Rooms with odd geometry or many sound-absorbing obstructions don't work very well. A good rule of thumb is that these will only protect areas an IR remote would reach from the outlet they're plugged into -- in other words, line-of-sight.
One word of advice -- don't go cheap! The cheap ones audibly click, and give sensitive people headaches. The good ones are unnoticable to pets and humans.
As for range, it varies -- but usually only one room per device. See labeling!
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
Me fail Eniglish? That's unpossible!
Someone hates these cans.
Note: CmdrTaco is not a good person to take lessons from.
I used to live on the 2nd floor up in an old building. Some builders came and started ripping apart the basement of the building: pretty soon we had mice running around our flat, scared off from the lower levels.
I bought a pair of Ultrasonic repellers for about £80, or USD$120. At the same time I put some poison down, which certainly thinned the numbers out.
But I think it was the Ultrasonic babies that kept them away; I don't think you can rely on them to rid yourself of the pests, but they are definitely effective at stopping them coming back, or in for the first time.
You have to place them somewhere sensible with line of sight to most of the area you want to cover. This is a bit of a pain, but worth it.
I'd recommend them. But get good ones.
Well, main thing is you need to find out how they are getting in and be prepared to seal it off once they have been ejected.
As for ultrasonics, I think you will find a cheap radio tuned to a Talk station will probably be as effective in driving them away.
Also worth investigating would be investing in a cat or similar predator.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Just keep your stereo at full blast 24/7, looping through some death metal mp3's. Should keep all pests away, neighbours and spouses included.
-Filik.
Get a Cat.
You need to do more than kill them, or drive them out. Think of it is a security problem, and patch the holes. If you keep killing them, and they keep coming back, there are problems. For them to be living in your residence a few things have to available to them; easy entrance, food, water, and shelter. The last you can't do anything about, short of tearing / burning down your place. But you can patch holes, clean the attic, fix leaking pipes, remove pond from the back yard, etc. Overall, just make it un-appealing for the critters to live there.
Have you tried any professional services?
IMO, the sonic thing is a total scam. Many of my old customers tried that, and eventually gave up. (I got out of the pest control business in '97 or so)
Neutering prevents straying so the hunting should be more localised with a neutered cat.
Also get a Moggie or Heinz 57 from a shelter, get it young and handle it frequently to socialise it. Dont get a pedigree most of which are useless at hunting, and couldn't hunt to save their lives.
We've seen mice and roaches in our apartment so I bought a small ultrasonic thingie for the kitchen.
The mice appear to have fled the area. We caught a mousie in the front room (glue trap), but we haven't seen any mice in the back of the house. If you can stand finding a dead mouse now and then, I recommend glue traps.
The roaches don't seem to mind the ultrasonic at all.
Surprisingly, Chrysantemum seeds work against roaches. We set some out a while back and the roaches dissapeared. Apparently there are more effective breeds (of seeds, not roaches), so do some research.
My father is a blogger.
You can't just kill the pests, you have to kill them and send a message to the others. I suggest making little crosses and crucifying the mice and leaving those aroung the attic. (Hint, use staples.) Also leaving squirrel heads on small metal pikes seems effective. Keeps other people from snooping around in your attic as well.
Get off my lawn.
What's up with having a comma preceding the word that is, Last ?
There were some moles in my yard, so I bought some of the vibrating stakes that are supposed to repell them. And a load of D cell batteries to put in them. I never did get around to installing them, but the moles are gone now.
By the way, does anyone know of any other devices that use D cells these days? I have a bunch in my junk drawer...
It's a known fact that some animals (especially smaller ones) can hear a much wider frequency range than humans can.
"genetically similar" means nothing - A few kilohertz can make a lot of difference.
But one has to be careful not to get TOO close to the human hearing range, as within 3-4 kHz of the human hearing range, it causes US discomfort. A bit above that and it won't cause pain for humans at all, but will sound like an unholy shriek to a small animal.
Note: I'm talking about the ultrasonic-only ones. And having multiple small units scattered around is probably better for our ears than one large super-loud unit, as one superloud unit might still have enough SPL to damage someone's ears even though we can't hear it. (Although it helps that the ear won't have any resonances at those frequencies - This is why smaller animals can hear higher freqs, smaller ear canals = higher resonant freqs.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Do ultrasonic deterrents really keep rodents out
of your house?
No. Not at all. What they do is make the environment less attractive to the rodents. If you are in a duplex, the rodents run next door. If you own your own house, they get used to it (how long did it take you to ignore the traffic/train/plane while you are sleeping?)
What is the range?
See above "no" answer.
Do they last, or do the rodents eventually return?
See above answer.
Are they truly innocuous to dogs and cats?
The mouse chirpers bug the crap out of my dog. On a more important note, they bug the crap out of me. (my wife would say "insert obvioius pest joke here") The mosquito ones are the worst, but I can definitely hear all of the "pest control" ultrasonic gizmos. Maybe I'm just picking up on a weird harmonic, but they're more annoying than the high pitched whine of older TVs, to me.
If TVs and flourescent lights don't bother you, then this won't bother you, but be assured that your pets *will* notice.
How do you measure success?"
Decrease in mouse turds always worked for me.
If you're seriously interested in getting rid of mice, get a cat. Get a female cat (spayed!) from the humane society. Keep it outside if you don't like cats (they like to roam, anyway).
Best rodent control are mousers. Female cats make the best mousers.
Chances are that you could make a pretty decent ultrasonic repeller for a fraction of the price of commercial ones. Look around at some electronics sites, but the basics would be:
555 timer - Set it to free-run somewhere in the 26-30 kHz range. You might have to experiment a bit. It will probably be most effective 1-2 kHz over the highest frequency that causes you discomfort.
Audio amplifier - LM386 audio amps are cheap and easy to use. They're a high-power op-amp for all practical purposes.
The silicon and additional passives would cost you under $10 most likely, which leaves you $20-30 for a speaker with good ultrasonic response and still be a fraction of the price of these $80-120 commerical units people talk about.
Bonus is that you can retune it down a few kHz if you want to intentionally piss someone off. This is more effective if you add circuitry that sweeps the frequency over a few kHz. (This might hold true for animals too.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
...come to think of it, I've never used them period. But my folks bought one type (I can't remember if it was ultrasonic or EMP) and my aunt bought the other (to compare and then buy a second of whichever worked the best) to get rid of earwigs and they made zero difference.
Your best bet for getting rid of mice is sealing up your house. Short of that, I'm with a lot of the other people above - get a cat. No, they don't kill the mice outright, but they tend to think of mice as the feline equivalent of superballs (those ultra bouncy rubber thingies), which tends to wind up kill the rodents from massive heart failure.
If a cat's not feasable try and find out exactly where they're coming in and load that 'area' with poison and traps.
It's important to get them BEFORE they nest - otherwise you'll wind up with a brood of mice that'll never leave.
Just look at where you can get these things. There is huge money in installation of these devices in commercial establishments if the cost would justify the results. Yet, the only ones selling these things are the people who don't have to answer to the client month after month about why it isn't working.
I had an older house that had bats in the attic, and installed an ultrasonic repeller with good luck, AC version so I wouldn't have to climb around up there changing batteries. It probably worked because the attic was relatively open and bats are sound sensitive creatures.
For mice in the basement I used traps and our cat.
Take it into a pet store, and see if the rodents freak. Cruel, but damnit, we need data.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
I have seen from experience more than once than a house with ferrets running about seems to never have other rodents of any type (or anything other edible moving object not part of the family.)
I'm convinced that mice, rats, snakes, etc just pack up and leave the moment a ferret is about.
Get cats or dogs. Imagine if the brain cavity of your kids were of the same resonance as the ultrasonic transmitter, or of some natural predator of those rodents.
Better yet rebuild the walls. Being geeky isnt always being smart.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
...so they won't work on the critters in the walls.
The sound frequency is damped right out of existence upon hitting something, so using them in a space with lots of corners, furniture, or sonic shadows will be fruitless. Though, if you knew they were all entering your house through a certain cleared-out area, it might be worth flooding that space with them. Otherwise, I think it will cost a fortune, have limited success, and, based on other another poster's comment, may give you headaches or brain damage.
Personally, having kids prevented me from putting out too many traps, and chemicals were out of the question.
First of all, you have to get rid of their entry points, clog up their traffic routes in the walls, and trap the ones that start walking through your living room as a result. I live in an old bungalow, and was surprised to find that behind my baseboards, there was enough room to roll a baseball through (just like in the cartoons, they had set up a little world back there).
The most effective thing that worked for me (outside of getting a cat) was to pull up the baseboard molding around a few rooms (especially the kitchen), and fill it with 'expanding foam spray.' The mouse superhighway was gone. I caught a couple with traps, but they never came back. It also made my house a bit less drafty. I filled in any space where I thought they may be able to enter the house, either with foam or ultra-fine steel wool (mice won't try to chew through it).
Low tech, but effective. It cost me about $10 total, compared to $5-$25 for each of the ultrasonic devices.
When I moved into my house, there were mice everywhere. After about a month of the cats ripping everything out of my kitchen cupboards every night, there are no more mice. Good kitty.
My parents live on a farm, and in high school I had a ferret. His name was Jaws. Jaws liked to run around in the yard and explore all of the buildings. The mice quickly disappeared from there also. Except, I think an owl or a hawk got Jaws one day because he never came back. Now there are mice again. Maybe the cat got him too, but they always seemed all buddy-buddy when I was around them. Maybe it was like when I beat up on my little brother and my parents walked in, we pretended to be best friends, and as soon as they left I would start torturing him again.
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A heatlhy insurance policy and a fair bit of petrol seems to work. I haven't heard of too many vermin that can live through fire.
Untrasonic Electronic Pest Control is great for me because I am fundamentally opposed to anything trasonic. (It's a religious thing)
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
I have declared war on the pests in my house.
No, no, you've got it all wrong. Don't say you're declaring war. Say that you're "liberating" them from their miserable existance scurring around in the walls and such. Then you're morally justified in bombing the holy beejesus out of them and they'll be eternally grateful just like the Iraqis.
Oh wait...
GMD
watch this
I live in an area surrounded by pasture and ditches. The mosquitos during the summer are terrible. There has to be some farm chemical or something in them that isn't in mosquitos elsewhere, because when I get a mosquito bite here, I get a 1.5 inch diameter red spot around the bite, but elsewhere I just get the usual small bump. It's really a pain when trying to do anything outside during the summer.
A week or two ago there was an ad in the paper for an outdoor ultrasonic insect repellant that claimed one acre range on flies, mosquitos, and "no-see-ums" (I think they're brine flies or some kind of gnat), all three of which are a problem here. So, does anybody know if the large devices are effective against mosquitoes, flies, and gnats? It would really make my life a lot easier if I could go outside during twilight without smelling like insect repellant spray. My yard is very open, so line-of-sight isn't a problem.
If the ultrasonic devices don't work, is there some other way to cover at least a half acre without placing mosquito coils in a grid all over?
A solution to the problem with music today
I have friends who bought a "vacation" home in Death Valley, CA [actually it's just a party house for a bunch of vector ecologists and related people] and it used to be overrun with rodents. Nervous about Hantavirus see here [note also has a few good links to help you out on your quest] they tried one out, one of the middle priced ones I believe, and it works great. One of their neighbors doesn't use one and he gets drowned rats and mice in his toilet all the time. As one of the above posts mentions eliminate the point of entry and you are halfway there.
-- Some days you're the dog; some days you're the hydrant.
This system won't work unless you have a fan blowing the rats against the electrostatic pl -- oh wait, wrong (similar) 'ask slashdot'. My bad.
An elderly couple in my neighborhood once tried one of these things. I don't know if it bothered the mice, but it certainly did annoy their human neighbors who were younger and not quite so hard-of-hearing.
Our house got infested this winter in a way I've never seen before. The blasted things were everywhere, chewing up food, eating the dog's food, pooping and pissing all over the basement.
I bought one of the ultrasonic things, but I can't honestly tell you if it seemed to work. By the time I bought it, we were nearly overrun, and they're only supposed to keep them out, not make them leave if they've already gotten comfortable.
I ended up setting out traps. I started with a few at a time, and ended up having a dozen or more all over the house. I bought the cheapest ones I could, and threw them away when they'd caught one. I think I once caught 10 in a night. My final score for the winter was 29.
I tried a glue trap too, but those don't kill them, so you've got to figure that part out. I wasn't satisfied with just throwing them into the trash to starve and didn't have the nerve to squish them. I tried to rig up a little mousey gas chamber, by putting a box with the trap and mouse over the exhaust pipe of my car and running it. It wasn't nearly as quick and probably not as painless as I'd hoped. A conventional mouse trap is effective, and death comes pretty quickly in most cases, without undue suffering.
A cat is still probably the best answer, but my partner is alleric. Our dog proved to be pretty useless. I think she thought they were her friends.
Wil
wiki
They are not a better mouse trap.
What about hypersonic deterrents. Git yerself a gun... or move out and sign over the deed to the leader of the vermin.
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
Get yourself a self-cleaning, wireless, environmentally safe rodent exterminator.
Cats. Taking out the trash since the days of the Pharaohs.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
I have a problem with little nuthatches attacking the side of my house (peck,peck,peck....peck,peck,peck,...etc) anybody try these against birds?
The Merriam-Webster dictionary doesn't know what untrasonic is, either.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
To be more pacific, the word you is looking for are "ultrasonic." Besides there is, a comma in the wrong, place.
Ultrasonic is crap. It's noisy (I can hear it anyway) and pretty useless. I've had great success getting cockroaches out of my house with one of those magnetic resonance devices. They're probably called something different. They work by sending pulses down your power lines that create "bad" magnetic fields that insects (I don't know about rodents) don't like. I haven't noticed any problems with electronics devices either so it mustn't do bad things to the power source.
I don't know where this came from, but I got it from my parents... Take a five gallon bucket, and cut it down about halfway, and discard the top. Make a ramp out of a piece of wood, such that a mouse could run up it. Cut two notches on opposite sides of the bucket, so that a wire will can lay accross the width of the bucket. Put a pop or beer can on the wire, and coat it with peanut butter. The last step is to fill the trap with antifreeze. The antifreeze will pickle any rodents that happen to jump on in, reducing the frequency of neccasary cleanings.
I tried to draw a diagram, but it was aborted by the lameness filter.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I am taking care of a place out in the country, and to solve a squirrel problem I 1) went on a major hole-filling campaign, including cutting blocks of wood to fill gaps in this old wooden basement door, 2) took to "relocating with extreme prejudice" any squirrels seen outside the house with a 20-gauge.
Recently I came under squirrel attack where one had chewed into the siding and chewed into the Styrofoam insulation board underlaying the siding -- didn't get into the house because under that are 4-inch timbers of a 100-year old log construction. Filled the hole with foam-in-a-can and the buggers started another hole in the siding. Filled that one with roofing tar and started playing NPR full-blast on the radio when I am not in the house. Crossing fingers that that works as the squirrels that are left on the property seem to know to run when I come with the 20-gauge -- the ones which would just freeze seem to be gone by a kind of Darwinian process.
17:49 21/5/2546
... feed ... maybe it works.
TOPIC: vermin
yup a CAT, yup a DOG, maybe a not poisonous snake (python, anaconda and a lamp for heat).
get some cat-piepy on cotton, just a little, so the smell doesn't bother you, and place at stratigical places in the attic.
where do the mousi find food/water? i personally like insects escpecially ants, they're my little nanobots that clean everything up after a party. takes them a day or two and all the potato-chip crums are gone!
but the roaches/grashoppers/earthworms are food for mice so get them first. i don't think mousi eat spiders so leave them.
maybe you can build a mousi house in the garden or somewhere and stack it with enough food, maybe they'll leave.
mousi house with a one-way door. when you got most of them, go to forest, release. the lynx will have a blast.
bring back one-way mousi-house, repeat. etc.
get some cheese+water, shredd it. get some/alot sleeping pills, mix
catch a male mousi, bombard it with gamma-rays, so it get's impotent, release: birth-control. *difficult*
the ultra-sonic thingys suck. i can hear it and it gives me a head-ache. not that i'm a rat.
feymann says humans can smell better then dogs, which doesn't make him a super-dog, now does it?
you can get one, but buy it only if they give you a years worth of ear-plugs.
Depends on the rodent. If the rodent is infected by toxoplasma gondii it might not be as afraid, in fact might even be attracted to the urine.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/avantgostory/0,6347,1036 90-4044336,00.htmlu ment/abstracts/Holli man's%20toxo%20abstract.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/850556.stm
http://www.stanleylab.org/Doc
We were killing 4-6 spiders every day when we first moved into our current house. So we purchased some brand from home depot, and they didn't work at all -- which proved it was all a crock, like I thought it was.
Then my wife tried another brand (Sunbeam, from Costco). Wow! We went from 4-6 spiders a day to 1 per month. Then after three months, it went up to about 1 per week (Sunbeam says they get used it) and has stayed there ever since. We have them all over (they make little 'clicking' noises, but we never notice them).
Daniel
Go to the pet store/animal shelter and pick out two or three of the most spastic, rambunctious cats you can find. Give them free rein in your house. Clean up the pest carcasses. :)
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
There were no Walgreens during the civil war.
1) catch mouse.
2) drown in bucket of water.
Anyone found anything effective against gophers? Here in CA, they eat the root of just about anything -- even posts in the ground if you water the posts!
:-/
I have 4 beagles and a cat -- cat is quite effective against mice/rats, but just leaves the snakes inside for me. So far in 5 years, and maybe 100 holes dug in ground by dogs (we don't need no stinkin' yard), I've only seen 1 gopher -- got by the eldest beagle (didn't actually see beagle get it, but it as fresh killed -- could have been cat that got it, but the dogs spend alot more energy digging. Even though beagles are normally effective hunters, the gophers are about the size of large rats, and I can' think of any dogs small enough to go down a gopher hole.
I wonder about ferrets...illegal to own in California though...too afraid that they'll escape into the wild and breed (even sterilized).
I think the local garden shops buy the gophers from out of state and release batches of them in areas around town every spring just to keep their sales up.
Every year, they seem to get worse...and most seem to have a direct tunnel to my yard. I want to remove some of the gopher baskets from some of the trees -- had a 20 foot peppermint eucalyptus fall over this last winter -- tipped right in the basket -- like none of the roots had gone through the basket at all. I have a feeling that the baskets are having a Bonsai effect on their growth -- and for fruit trees -- none of the citrus are high enough off the ground to keep the fruit from the dogs...not good.
But I almost just KNOW that as soon as I remove a basket (providing I could figure out how to do that with the tree in the ground) the tree will be gone. Had a 10 year old passion vine die in a few weeks when gophers got too hungry and went for it. Insane!