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How To Keep Rats From Eating My Cables?
An anonymous reader writes "I am curious to know what vermin prevention/eradication methods are used in other locations. I am working at a dealership and we have an exterminator man who puts out glue traps and bait stations, but they still come and eat my cable. The latest was a couple of fiber runs — very expensive. I have threatened my boss with a cat for the server room (my office), going so far as to cruise the local Humane Society's website and eye-balling a nice Ragdoll-Siamese mix. Even if I do feel like dealing with a litter box, cat hair in the equipment and pouncings on my keyboards (and I'm not sure I do), that only covers the server room. We have multiple buildings on the campus which get locked up to prevent theft, but it isn't secure enough to keep out the critters and the latest chew spot was in the ceiling. Any ideas?"
Rats and mice don't eat cables...They chew the insulation off to make their nests...or if it happens to be in their way. So your best be it to figure out what the hell they're eating, and shut down their food supply. They'll move on shortly thereafter.
The word "campus" may put paid to that notion, however. Campus implies lots of people, lots of garbage, and lots of space. God help you if it's a college campus, the promised land of vermin the world over, where bulldog sized rats subsist on half a cheeseburger out of the dumpster. If that's the case, then there is no way you'll be able to shut off their food.
Introducing predators isn't necessarily a bad idea, but its a measure that can, in no way, co-exist with traditional methods of poison and trapping. Your predator will likely set off the traps and poison itself on the bioaccumulated toxins in the bodies of its prey. If you do get a cat, better feed it a bunch of activated charcoal with its kibble.
Which brings us to poison and trapping. It's not that they don't work. They work GREAT. If they're not working, it means you're not using enough. You need to come to the budgetary equilibrium where the amount you spend on extermination makes sense based on the cost of cable replacement.
So if you can't shut off their food, and you can't stomach the thought of your kitties/ferrets/snakes keeling over dead from poison every month or two, you're going to have to up the extermination.
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You can get this at any hardware or garden store. Basically it is just a spray bottle full of capsaicin, which is what gives chili peppers their kick. It is commonly sold as rabbit or deer repellent sprays. Aviaries, which have huge rodent problems, will mix hot pepper powder in with bird seed because birds are not affected by it, but the rodents won't touch the seeds then. But a warning - DO NOT get this on your eyes or hands and apply it to the cables in a well ventilated area or outside. And if you put it on cables, you need to wear gloves in the future when handling them.
For a big install that may not be possible...If all the wire is already pulled, for example, you can't unpull it all and add conduit without a huge expense.
On the other hand, it may be pulled in quantities that exceed common conduit widths. I've seen even small buildings with bundles of cable the diameter of a soccer ball, and if the conduit is that big, it's more likely a convenient rat super-highway than a deterrent.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Cats have been used widely to get rid of rats and mice since the beginning of time. perhaps you should get some of those ?
Not all cats are good mousers, however. It really helps to have one who was properly taught by their mama-cat how to do it.
Bow-ties are cool.
Not all cats are good mousers, however. It really helps to have one who was properly taught by their mama-cat how to do it.
Say what? I'll agree that some cats are better hunters than others, but I've yet to meet a non-grossly overweight cat that doesn't show immediate interest in anything smaller than it scurrying about. Seriously, stick any cat in a building where all kinds of interesting sounds and smells are going on, and they are good to go.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
There's always a way to get a protective sheath overtop of a cable run.
You can slit a large rubber tube or PVC pipe section and slip it over the cabling in the exposed sections.
You can also take ducting metal and screw it over the exposed cables to connect it up to whatever wall or corner it's running along. It -will- cost money to do, but that cost is almost certainly less than the cost of replacing fiber, and so should be an easy sell.
.22 air rifle, 3 Beers and 2 cans of Redbull. Make a night of it.
One caveat with poison: it doesn't kill them right away. I put rat poison in my attic to get rid of the mice that were chewing the insulation off the A/C. Eventually it worked, but not before one of the little fuckers crawled down out of the attic, into my closet, curled up in the toe of my slipper, and died. And I didn't find it until about a month later (although I did think my closet smelled funny.) Don't poison the rats unless you're comfortable with the idea of finding rat carcasses where you least expect them for the next couple of years. (I expected carcasses in the attic, but I also found a dead mouse under the tub when I remodeled.) Mice are pretty small, they dessicate and mummify pretty quickly. Rats would be much worse.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
one is a coating for the cabling to "discourage" chewing.
popular choices are anything capsaicin based or something with a bitter substance (bitter to rodents that is)
another is those ultra-sonic repellers (it's worth a try....some rats may not give a "rat's" ass about it and still continue to do their deeds)
In the end, it may not be just one thing but a combination of things.
poisons to kill off the rats, deterrents to prevent them from chewing on cabling, and making it very unpleasant for them to live on the lot.
Especially, yanking out the welcome mat from under them.
Those rats who don't learn not to leave and not to chew on the cables will get poisoned.
My basement door doesn't exactly seal right (my goal this year is to replace it) and we used to have mice coming into the basement all the time.
The fix was to get one of those high-frequency boxes you plug in and clicks every now and then. Ever since I put one near that door, we haven't had a mouse problem.
Second thought. If you do decide to use snap traps or glue traps, be sure to use peanut butter instead of cheese. Cheese dries out too quickly and they never eat it. PB stays good for a long time.
Third thought (yea I said two, here's a bonus). The very popular anticoagulant called Warfarin (AKA Coumadin) was originally used as rat poison.
Worst case of that I'd personally seen was a mouse that'd had its face stuck to the glue trap. In its struggles to free itself, it'd pulled its eyeball out of the socket.
After that, I decided that snap-traps were less cruel...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
These are just regular sized cats with no ninja training.
Rats will happily rip a hole through drywall so don't really care if you block up holes. I blocked up some holes with chew-proof material and the bastards just ripped another hole.
If you have rats inside, then the chances are that they are an overflow population from somewhere else. We didn't have rats in the house until the population built up in the barn and the "turf wars" pushed some of the rats into the house. As soon as we killed a lot of the rats in the barn they disappeared from the house.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
You were probably kidding, but I'd like to point out that our local humane society has rules against adopting out animals for the purpose of pest management or hunting.
Rat poison isn't that efficient.
Rats are able to learn. They'll end up learning that said poison is poisonous to them. (That's why lot of modern poison have very delayed effect. So that it's harder for the rat to make the connection and learn what's killing them).
Bio-accumulation : predators higher up in the food chain are going to diet on poison-rich rats, and thus are going to poison themselves through their food.
By using rat poison, not only are you (attempting to) kill rats. But there's a high risk that you'll be killing the neighbors' cats, snakes, ferrets, etc.
On the other hands, predators have been considered efficient and used successfully for the past millenia.
So getting several cats *could* be a solution.
A couple of caveat :
- Cut the rat poison first, otherwise kitty is going to get poisoned. (or at least get advices from a vet on how to protect kitty).
- Get a grown up cat. One that has already learned to use the litter box, has already learned to hunt, etc.
- When getting a cat, get one who has grown up outdoor and is used to hunting. Avoid the overweighted, indoor, constantly drooling and sleeping type.
- Prefer shorter hair : they are simpler to take care of, tend less to puke hair balls, and tend to leave less hair around.
None the less, try to secure and isolate the server cabinet with proper dust filters. Other wise you might have to often vacuum your server's radiators. (Anyway, the filters will be good against dust bunnies too).
- Depending on the size of the territory to cover. Adding a couple more cats might help, if you can manage to handle them all.
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Heh. I wouldn't have pegged you for a big poison proponent. I agree though; if you can't shut off their food, there really isn't any other option.
As far as humane-ness, if you're killing them, does it really matter how?
Why not peg me for a poison proponent? Science and rationality are based on what is accurate, and effective. I am a rationalist. :)
There are more humane ways of killing things than others. The least suffering and pain caused to the organism the better. Jewish Kosher protocols require one to slit the carotid artery of the animal with a blade with no defects. Cutting oneself with a super sharp blade, a number of humans can attest that it is fairly painless. The animal then bleeds out very quickly bringing unconsciousness within seconds.
Not only is it the Jewish Kosher protocol, but it also is similar to the protocol for the Japanese ritual suicide used by women, "Jigai".
Now, throwing them into a fire or boiling pot is pretty mean and wrong, unless the animal is proven to "not experience pain".
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
And glue traps are incredibly cruel; other killing traps almost as much so. Live-trap them and drive them (a few miles or more) to someplace green without buildings around, make them work for a living.
I tried using a live trap for rats. Out of a dozen or so, I only managed to snag 2. I reluctantly ended up having to use the crush-their-skulls version for the rest. It's bad enough when the trap kills them. It's really gruesome when it only partly kills them and I have to finish the job.
My girlfriend's landlord put in glue traps.
We started hearing this weird high-pitched noise, like a flyback transformer in a CRT going wonky.
It was mice screaming because they'd been stuck to the glue trap for days and were starving to death.
If you want to get them loose without killing them don't pull them. A: you pull parts off and B: they're still covered in glue so they just stick to debris and fluff and leaves and whatever else. Vegetable oil will get them loose. Just, y'know, don't use a lot or you end up with drowned oily mice.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I have/had a similar set of problems.
1. I've owned pet rats and know what they can eat.
2. I currently own house rabbits.
3. I have a recurring mouse problem.
So lemme sum up. A rabbit can eat through a 14 gauge stranded copper cord of the sort you'd use for your refrigerator. Guess how I figured that out? Since it's starting at one side it doesn't ever cross both the live and neutral, so it doesn't get electrocuted. It can eat every cord off the back of a computer in under three minutes. Guess how I figured that out? A rat doesn't have quite the toothy abilities of a rabbit but it's fairly close. They can certainly cut through thin copper.
Neither the rabbits nor the rats -- nor my dog -- have been bothered by sprays intended to keep animals from digging/chewing on things. The super hot pepper-derived stuff stopped the rabbits but not the rats, and my dog loves the stuff. The sour/bitter stuff didn't slow any of them down even slightly.
Plastic split conduit doesn't even slow them down. Even when soaked in bitter or hot do-not-chew stuff.
Rats can chew through the side of a lead pipe and crawl through a hole the size of a US quarter. I don't have evidence that they can chew through copper pipe but I wouldn't be surprised.
Reducing food doesn't work. Once they're established, you can't keep the place clean enough. I have no idea how wild mice manage to find nutrition but they do. We keep all our food in sealed containers and vacuum and roomba every other day, and neither the dog nor the sometimes cat deter the mice in the slightest. The mice do, however, drive the dog and the cat completely insane, so if you want to have your predator madly clawing at the wall where it can either hear or smell a mouse, go for it. Both dogs and clawed cats can dig through standard drywall, and then you have a repair to do. (and they remember it and keep trying. Pitbulls are very, very retentive dogs and she'll dig through 12mm thick plywood to get to where she remembers a mouse or rat or squirrel to have hidden, once, six months ago.)
hate to say it but d-con and other awful poisons are probably the best way to go, as far as eradication, and flexible conduit to protect the lines you can't easily replace.
As I said elsewhere, glue traps are probably more evil than poison, and oftentimes live traps are as well, because you don't check them often enough and the animal dies of dehydration. And if you're really lucky the animal will manage to drag the glue trap into a place you can't get to and if you're young and still have good ears you can hear its little high-pitched screams for a couple days before it does die.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
We killed 14 of the mice. The mice under our subfloor that went to two different fiber optic wire distribution boxes (FDBs) in separate rooms separated by a drywall sub-wall. These mice would chew through a specific wire in each of our two FDBs. Some theorized they were attracted to the light in the bent fiber, some theorized that perhaps the tech that terminated the cables with SC connectors may have eaten something and the scent attracted the rodents. Much cayenne pepper, many mouse traps and persistence stopped the mice finally.
You'd think so, but I've successfully re-used snap traps. Mice will brave death for peanut butter.
I have personally seen someone pull a mouse off a glue trap and leave the feet behind.
Mice are pretty flimsy, when it comes down to it. Rats less so.
They make armored innerduct for fiber runs. It's also known as "Pest Duct".
http://www.innerduct.com/products/hdpe_innerduct.php#pest_duct
The latest Norscan Report has an article with some useful information.
"Problematic Pests: Protecting Your Cables":
http://www.norscan.com/PDF/0901news.pdf