How to Get Rid of Rats in Your House

The first thing you need to do is find out where the rats are entering your home. Typically, they squeeze through gaps in the foundation or around pipes entering your home. But more common with rats is to find window screens with holes chewed in them.

You'd think rats would chew enormous holes, right? Wrong. They are typically about two inches in diameter.

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Repair the hole in the screen or replace the entire screen with a new one. However, rats are creatures of habit, and where there is one rat, there are many. You will likely need to repair the screen or screens several times before you have gotten rid of all the animals. I suggest just patching the holes until you stop finding signs of rodent activity.

If they are coming in through the foundation, you'll need to fill those gaps. For areas around pipes, spray foam works wonders.

The next step is to figure out the path the rats are taking through your house. If you find holes in your window screens, half your work is over.

Rodents typically travel from the site of entry to your kitchen or pantry, where the food is. They will also set up a den in a quiet, undisturbed corner, under an appliance, or under a sofa.

You might hear scratching sounds. You might hear squeaks. You might even see a flash of brown out of the corner of your eye. All those will help you locate a trail.

If they are coming into the house, you might see a dirty patch on your wall where the dirt from them coming and going is discoloring the wall. We found a patch like that where they were running down the back of a cupboard.

The third step is to select a method of elimination. There are many to choose from. They include: poison, live traps, spring traps, rat zappers (electric traps), cats and glue traps.

Poisons can be highly effective. The downsides to those are that they are also hazardous to pets and the environment. Also, I've found that the rats or mice will take the bait, then disappear to some corner of the house, or the space between the downstairs ceiling and upstairs floor, or behind a wall.

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They will die there and stink up the entire house for several days. Disgusting. Try to eat dinner with Eau de Rat perfuming your home!

Live Traps catch rats and mice but do not harm them. That means it is up to you to release them somewhere away from your home and hope they don't return. Otherwise, you'll have to kill them.
Snap or Spring Traps are the most well known rodent traps in this country. They need to be baited and set manually. They can spring on you or your children or pets, so they must be placed in an out-of-the-way location.

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Also, when these spring traps go off, they usually leave a bloody mess. You could dispose of the trap and rodent, but that's wasteful and can get expensive, especially if you have a severe infestation with lots of animals.

You'll need to get the correct size trap. If you have mice, you'll need mouse traps. If you have rats, you'll need rat traps. If you use the wrong size, they won't get caught. Instead, they'll learn to stay away from traps in the future.

They may also just get injured and crawl away to die somewhere under your couch or in your wall. Dead Rodent Air Freshener is disgusting to have to live with for the three or so days it lasts.

Cats will work if they are cats that actually kill the mice. Most cats just play with the mouse or rat and don't kill them.
Glue Traps will trap anything and everything that touches them, including roaches, ants, geckos, hair, dust, mice, rats, dog paws, dog ears, your feet, your kids...you get the picture. The mouse or rat dies a slow death, squeaking and scratching for days, unless you do something to kill it more quickly. I consider that to be animal cruelty and refuse to use them.

They are also horrible for the environment, since you dispose of them as soon as you catch something. I prefer traps that are reusable and better for the environment...and my wallet, too.

Rat Zappers are electric traps that deliver a powerful shock just large enough to kill a mouse or rat instantly. When it enters the trap, nothing happens. The rodent moves toward the rear, where the bait is. When it gets there, it steps on a metal plate. This is connected by a wire to the battery chamber. This sets off the shock, and your mouse or rat is dead.

These zapper traps kill immediately. They are the most humane, because they rarely have failures, unlike the spring traps. Unlike the glue traps, the animal doesn't slowly starve to death, and unlike live traps, you aren't the one having to look it in the eye and then kill it. Ugh.

The downside to these is that they use batteries. You'll need to buy those separately. But using rechargeable batteries works like a charm.

Another downside is that you cannot use them outside, since they cannot get wet. Unless you can catch the rodents in your house, this is not very effective. You can try building an enclosure that will keep the zapper dry, and they sell a holder supposedly for that purpose, but I haven't tried it yet.

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When the trap has been set off, a red indicator light on top flashes. If you check the trap and find it empty, it means the batteries are low and need to be changed. This is a good thing, because it lets you know there is something else running around in your house that needs to be caught.

Sometimes the rat zapper is the only way I know there are more mice in my house. They can be amazingly stealthy and invisible. I know when the trap is sprung that something has done so.

If you use peanut butter on a square of cardboard for bait, like I do, it's even more indicative. If the cardboard is gone, a rodent has dragged it away. If the cardboard is still there, it's probably a roach that set the trap off.

Rat Zappers are my choice for catching rats or mice. They kill instantly, without mess, and last for years. They cost more than other traps, but their efficiency and ease of use make them a fantastic value. I'll never go back to other traps.

You can find a detailed product review of my favorite Rat Zapper Classic, with tips and tricks, here: Rat Zapper Review

Place your trap somewhere along the pathway your rats or mice are using. If you're not sure, place them on the floor against a wall, or behind the refrigerator. If you know they are running into your cupboard or onto your counter, you can place them near the food bags they have been chewing open.

Check your traps often. Re-bait and re-set as necessary.

Continue this process until you no longer see signs of rodent activity. Then wait a few weeks or months, and set traps out again.

Why set traps even if you don't see or hear anything? Because in my experience, they come and go in cycles. After a while, food may get scarce outside, and they will chew another hole in a screen without your realizing it.

The sooner you can catch the few animals you have, the better. You will prevent them from reproducing and creating another large group or mice infestation.

The largest run I've ever had was 22 mice caught over a period of a week or two. That was when I didn't even think I had any!

Just be sure if you set traps when you don't think you have any mice or rats in the house, check them anyway. Once I forgot to check. I thought there were no more mice. I remembered only when the smell of the dead mouse got my attention. Yuck.

I hope you've found this article helpful. Don't let rodents take control of your home! Let technology work for you, and put these tools to work. If you follow these five steps, you will succeed in getting rid of rats or mice in your house.

We recently had another rat infestation. It got so bad, they went into the gardens and ate everything we had planted, even dug up all the soil in the beds and pots, ruining most of the plants.

Once the fruit on the trees had run out, and the garden had been decimated, they moved into the house. They chewed a hole in the window screen and ran in at night, chewing through bags of rice and flour in the pantry.

There is one major difference between rats and mice: rats are a lot smarter! That means they are harder to catch. And once they've had a trap spring on them, they will avoid them in the future. So here's what we learned in the process of getting this last rodent infestation under control.

You'll be lucky if they go into any traps at all. Rats are cautious and are not likely to go into the electronic zapper box.

Also, since they were mostly outside, we couldn't use the Rat Zapper anyway, so we tried a number of spring traps. They will work, but you need to be crafty yourself.

First, make sure you use bait that is securely fastened. We tied pieces of nuts, dried shrimp, and dried fruit onto the trap arms with small pieces of string.

Second, place the traps where they are going, just like I mentioned earlier. In the case of the hole in the screen, I did not cover it up, because if you know where the rat paths are, you have a MUCH greater chance of trapping them.

Place the traps next to any food they are eating. I had great success putting one trap on my kitchen counter, right next to the bag of rice they were eating from. I surrounded it with jars and other heavy objects, so the only place they could go to eat more rice was where the trap was located.

Disgusting, I know, to have blood and dead rat on your counter, but better dead than running around in your house!

We had an extra challenge because we have animals, so we couldn't put out poison or spring traps anywhere they might get caught in them. The solution to this was to put as many traps in places where the animals couldn't get to them, but the rats could, like behind the garbage cans in an area the animals can't get to. We lined up two traps between the garbage cans and the wall, with about one foot between the traps, and we got several rats that way.

Thirdly, set up multiple traps in a row or in a small area. When the rats came into the house and ate the pears I had setting out to ripen, I surrounded the pears with rat traps on all sides. I filled in the gaps with large containers, so the rats would have to go through the traps to get caught. That caught several.

In another area, I set up three traps in a row where I saw the rats running along the wall to get to a bag of rice. One of the traps I hid from the rats' view by putting a plastic bag in front of it. That way the rats would jump over the plastic bag and into the trap, which they couldn't see until they were in it. But just in case, there were two more traps lined up next to the first trap, and then the bag of rice. That worked once or twice, until they got smart and stopped eating from it.

Four, buy multiple traps. At about $2 apiece for the spring traps, you can buy a case and it will cost you less than one electronic zapper. We have about 20 traps now. If you just throw away the dead animal, you can re-use the traps again and again until they wear out or break, which will take years of use.

You'll have better success with the traps with younger rats, who have less experience. The older ones know to stay away and are much harder to catch.