Rat and Rodent Prevention
You can easily prevent rats and other nuisance rodent-family creatures from entering your home with a little bit of home repair work. In this industry, repairs made in order to keep wildlife out of your home is called exclusion. Before you begin to do any repairs or exclusion work, we recommend doing a thorough inspection of your home. During the inspection, you'll be able to locate any damaged areas, as well as areas that need extra materials placed on or around them to help keep animals out of your home.
Inspecting for Rats and Rodents
While there are some similarities between bat, raccoon, snake, and rodent inspections, keep in mind that all of these creatures have a different physiology, and will use these different physiologies to access your home in different ways. For instance, a raccoon may be able to scale a gutter, but it is the small appendages of a rodent that enable it to climb up stucco covered exterior walls. When you are looking for points of entry used by rats and rodents, look for small holes or cracks that a rat or rodent could flatten themselves down to pass through.
Materials for Rat and Rodent Prevention
Rats and rodents have two large teeth on their upper jaws called incisors. With these sharp edges and suprisingly powerful jaws, rats can shred up just about anything. Some stubborn rats will even chew on copper pipe! When you are selecting materials for your exclusion, understand that just about anything the rats can get their teeth into can be destroyed over time. Our technicians use a variety of materials for excluding rats, and favor tight steel mesh for large openings, and polyurethane resin foam for smaller ones.
One of the reasons why polyurethane foam is so exceptional at sealing smaller openings is that it expands as it dries. In the mind of a rat, if they can smell air on the other side of an opening, or see even the smallest bit of the other side of an opening, they may be motivated to start chewing and gnawing in order to widen the passage to allow themselves through. Expanding foam ensures that they don't sense that this is an openign at all anymore, and will move on.
Excluding Rats and Rodents
After gathering your materials and doing a throrough inspection, you'll have everything you need to start the exclusion. Knowing where rats have the potential to enter your home, and the proper materials to prevent that is a lifetime skill to have. Homeowners who are dedicated to rat and rodent prevention save thousands of dollars in their lifetime, and the lifetime of their home. If rat and rodent control and prevention is important to you, we recommend calling a wildlife managment professional to perform and inspection and do exclusion work for you.