My VW Passat TDI recently developed an issue that triggered that dreaded CEL. I hooked up dongle and fired up torque, and determined the NOx sensor was not reading properly. Made an appt w/ dealer to have fix it under my extended dieselgate warranty. The tech takes a look at it, and finds the wiring harness has been chewed through. That is not covered by my warranty. This not what I wanted to do today.
I don't enjoy eliminating rodents around my shop and property, but the consequences of letting them survive are too much.
I don't enjoy eliminating them either. I have mouse bait in the house, but I currently do not have a garage for the cars. They sit outside available to all the woodland wildlife. I live on outer edge of a national forest, I enjoy seeing all the wildlife traveling across the property. According to the tech, they think it was probably a squirrel which are all over the property.
It should be covered by comprehensive insurance though...
That is what I have been told, I need to check my deductible. Surprisingly, the bill for everything including a hose which was also chewed through was only $650. I was lucky that they could replace that whole small section of wiring. I had a friend tell me it happened to his brother, and the cost was significantly higher. This was just a few weeks ago, and insurance covered it.
ultraclyde said:I don't enjoy eliminating rodents around my shop and property, but the consequences of letting them survive are too much.
I drained four dead mice and the mostly dissolved remains of two or three more from my coolant drain pan today.
I am fairly sure, after scooping up waterlogged mouse guts by hand after they spilled on the floor, that I will never eat again.
In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :
That is not a pretty image you described. I almost feel like I need eye bleach to remove the image created in my mind after reading about it.
I hate all rodents with a passion. My wife was out of town for five days, the little sob's had a next with babies in the engine bay of her crv--that was in the garage! I discovered the next when I started the car to pick her up.
When I put the blower on my mustang I found I huge next on top of the engine under the manifold. Again, this was on a car that was garaged. If it wasn't for the fact that they would walk on my cars, I would for sure have a rescue cat that lived in the garage.
No sympathy for horrid creatures from me
I had one of God's woodland critters living under the steps to my basement service door; meh, they gotta live somewhere too. I could hear it rustling around under the leaves but never saw it, until ...... it hopped when leaping over an obstruction, it was a RAT. Put some poisoned food pellets under the steps and Mom and two kids went away, but not before finding their way into the house and nibbling a hole through a wall behind the refrigerator.
When our son was AGM of The Palm in Manhattan, he showed me how he filled mouse holes with brass Brillo pads before sealing it up. Chewing away, they cut their mouth up before going away. Mice I can handle, rats and chipmunks in the house or devouring my toys? I'm getting in battle dress.
A squirrel chewed a hole in the plastic fuel tank of my lawn mower. JB Weld to the rescue...
Amateurs...
We have a rather large hole that appeared recently in our yard, and suspect that it's either a possum or skunk. If it's the former, I'm cool with them, having found a baby and raising it several months before letting it go. A skunk on the other hand... sheez. I think I'm going to just leave him alone, as a live trap doesn't avoid me getting the worst of it when I go to transport the little one.
Oh, and while we're on the subject... gophers, damn them little guys. I'm to the point where I'm thinking of creating my own traps design, because the traps and poison they sell doesn't work for me (I'm convinced that it's actually healthy food, so that I have to go buy more). I only half way kid with the wife about spending retirement sitting out there with a pellet gun.
One last thing about bait, much like the nutritious gopher food that's sold as bait, I sometimes wonder the same about those blue/green blocks of rat bait. It keeps disappearing, which means either there's an endless supply of rats, or they like the stuff...
In reply to kb58 :
.22 with a bag of potatoes. Will guarantee a kill unlike the pellet gun, and the potatoes should stop it from alerting the neighbors.
Haha, yeah I read your post and thought, "potatoes... gophers and rats like potatoes?" Oh, nature's own silencer, got it! Yeah I don't know that even that would fly because I'm in the 'burbs and there's too much visibility into our yard.
I have to laugh at you rodent-loving softies. Hah!
If they're outside, I leave them alone. If they come inside my domain, they should prepare to die.
A couple weeks ago I spotted this dude hanging out near my boss's car. An hour or so later when boss left to go home, he was still loitering around:
Fast forward a week. Turns out the fat bastard did $900 damage to the wiring harness while he was under there.
One last thing about bait, much like the nutritious gopher food that's sold as bait, I sometimes wonder the same about those blue/green blocks of rat bait. It keeps disappearing, which means either there's an endless supply of rats, or they like the stuff...
I'm convinced they develop a tolerance to the poisons. This used to be ok, deal with it by mixing up the baits.
This is no longer the situation because all I can find now is tomcat brand. Being all one brand and one formula, combined with the speed at which rodents breed, it's becoming less and less effective.
I don't know when the other brands left the market, or if it's just lowes, Amazon, tractor supply, rural king, and home depot that are only carrying the single brand now, but the mice have been getting harder to control even with the abundance of predators in the area.
In slightly more detail... The blocks have never done me any good. Bags of the pellets would usually do the trick. When you start finding pellets stockpiled, change brands if you can. And don't follow the directions of one or two packs per room. Put them everywhere in the areas you're trying to clear, any hole or crevice, behind appliances, every drawer, every cabinet, on top of ceiling tiles. You want them to eat it, make it the only food available and make it abundant. Sometimes throwing some m&ms in the bag will help them get started eating it and sharing it.
Electric traps are too hard to keep clean, but they work wonders with good bait.
I just recently noticed that the local groundhog had moved into my yard. It has been on the neighbor's property for years. I have a family of bunnies living under my back deck. I am usually a live and let live kind of guy, but this incident has me re-evaluating that philosophy.
I grew up with a rodent infected horse barn with them occasionally visiting our 100 year old home.
I didn't go all G.Gordon Liddy on them but I do enjoy trapping the despicable little disease carriers when I smell their presence.
Got an enclosed garage? If so, it's time to unleash nature's most ruthless killing machines:
If I had a garage, I would consider getting one of my sister's barn cats.
Friend of mine owns a farm out in the boonies so he (of course) gets rats in his workshop regularly. He built a trap out of a 5 gallon bucket with an over-center PVC tube cut though the lid. He baits the pipe with peanut butter. When the rat walks down it the tube pivots down, dropping the rat in the bucket and then returns to level sealing him in. When said rat expires my buddy tosses the corpse up on the tin roof for the crows and buzzards. Easy peasy, somewhat queasy.
EDIT: Which reminds me...I heard there was a rat problem on a small island somewhere so they buried a baited 55 gallon drum and left it a while. In time all the rats fell in and there were enough customers that the meanest ones were able to survive by resorting to cannibalism. Eventually there was a sole survivor and they turned it loose on the island because it developed a taste for other rats. problem solved in the most metal fashion.
I don't use poison, because the snakes and cats take care of most of the problem. I keep some traps in the garage.
Every 4-5 years, my last house would get overrun by rats. Not cute little mice, huge nasty Norwegian rats. I was rather brutal with them. My record is 28 dead over 5 hours. All caught in Victor rat traps baited with peanut butter. I set 4 traps up around my shop and the back of the house and checked them every hour. Several times I would be walking back to the front of the house after resetting them and I would hear the snap, squeak. I'd turn around and set them again.
Half of the underside of that house was enclosed in hardware cloth trying to keep the nasty little bugger out.
The current house backs up to woods. I have yet to see a mouse or even evidence of one. I'm kind of surprised. There is a pair of hawks nesting in the woods and several foxes that pass through the neighborhood. I guess they are keeping the population under control.
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