
Re: Get a cat.
The size of the cat will also depend on how many mice it catches...
Pest control firm Rentokil has developed an Internet of Things mousetrap that gasses rodents and automatically calls out a disposal bod – and it can be yours for a cool £1,300. The mousetrap was featured by an entirely straight-laced BBC video reporter, who asked a Rentokil rep: “This could be quite an expensive proposition. …
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Yep. Cats catch them alright.
Then bring them in through the cat flap, and bat them around the floor for a bit until they end up under the fridge.
No internet connection is necessary to find the rodent corpse. After a week or two, you can just follow your nose. Or the trail of maggots.
Cats are the perfect solution...
You forgot the monthly "connection charge" for providing this vital service...
I do wonder if they charge for "false alarms" say where some script kiddie gets access and starts sending messages that the trap caught another one. After all, it is IoS and security is probably crap.
"Then bring them in through the cat flap, and bat them around the floor for a bit until they end up under the fridge."
Mine mostly operates a catch-and-release system into the house. I now have a (humane) mouse trap set under the fridge for just such occasions - ironically never needed one before having cats :-D
Try Aldi, my cats wolf down the select cat food. You could definitely feed a cat that's supposed to be mousing for under a tenner a month.
Of course, there's other expenses that make cats more costly : insurance (or vet bills), anti flea/tick application, and medicine if you're unlucky enough to have a cat with a chronic condition.
Still, they're very efficient at investigating anything that looks like it might possibly contain prey.
Ridiculous. Humane traps are a tenner each, add a wifi cam with movement detection and you're up to 50 quid. Depending on build quality, etc, I can see this being 130, but 1300?
BTW, be careful about thinking cats are necessarily effective. Some cats increase the rodent problem by bringing them in from outside, where they were minding their own business, and releasing them in your house.
Or its its like mine.... catches and kills them outside, then brings the body in as 'evidence' its got a house mouse and gets a reward as a result.
fortunetly, the more kitty treats it gets, the fatter and slower it gets therefore is unable to catch as many mice outside and get as many cat treats.
I suppose there is an formula for the optimal number of mice kitty can catch without fatter or slimmer.
But I cant be arsed to work it out
1300 quid for a mouse trap..... jeez rentokill has been taking lessons from BAE in fleecing the government
I think the functionality of the cat bringing in the mice is something that can be disabled in the options.
My ex had a cat, and she didn't have a cat flap at the time. The cat brought a mouse to the door twice, at which point she closed the door on it before it came in.
The cat obviously got the message as it never then brought home anything home again, ever even after she then fitted a cat flap. She gave it treats when it behaved, and it responded to them well. Honestly, I've worked with people stupider than that cat!
So you could say the cat conditioned your ex to give it treats by NOT doing something...
Certainly not dumb. My 6 vary in intelligence from the big ginger "me crush" via the airhead "ooh - look. A car! I wonder if it's friendly? Ow ow ow.." to the very intelligent half-siamese that's taught the other cats road safety (apart from the aforementioned airhead).
But one thing they are *all* very proficient is human (ie me) manipulation.
We had a cat that was a keen hunter, it would proudly leave the occasional corpse on the tarmac area outside the door.
Provided a few embarrassing moments.
Chatting to neighbour when cat drops rat at neighbours & my feet.
Once it struck the psycho hunting cat equivalent of gold and there were about a dozen rat corpses around the door area, unfortunately I only noticed them after the postie had been, I don't think she would have enjoyed navigating a route through rat corpse central..
We had zero mouse grief when that cat was around, no rodent was safe, indeed nothing below fox size was safe.
Chatting to neighbour when cat drops rat at neighbours & my feet.
Cats[1] (and ratting dogs) will very, very rarely eat rats unless they are really, really hungry. Which is understandable when you think about what rats will eat (ie everything). They must smell pretty disgusting to more acute noses than ours.
[1] We only know if there are rats around because we find their corpses in the garden. All almost entirely undamaged apart from a single bite to the back of the neck.
indeed nothing below fox size was safe.
Our big[1] female cat regularly sees foxes off - she loves dogs and is completely unafraid of them so I think she just sees the fox as a strange dog and sends it packing..
[1] At 6.5kg she's not that far off the weight of a small fox.
"add a wifi cam with movement detection and you're up to 50 quid. "
A weight triggered microswitch under a false floor of the trap costs only pennies. Presumably it has that already if it has to trigger the killing agent and switch on the electronics to send a message?
A weight triggered microswitch under a false floor of the trap costs only pennies.
How to connect your conventional spring-loaded cheese-laden mouse trap to the Internet: take a length of CAT5 cable with an RJ45 plug at one end. Strip back the other end and connect the RX and TX pairs by loosely twisting them together. If you plug this cable into a switch or a free interface in a system it'll see link up. Now position (and fix) the wire joints over the mouse trap in such a way that the trap triggering pulls the twists loose. The system or switch will see link down, allowing you to send any message anywhere based on this anywhere.
Total cost over a conventional spring-loaded cheese-laden mouse trap: a length of CAT5 cable that you can probably find in your junk pile valuable parts stock.
UK domestic cats eat about 5,000 species, so they may not pay much attention to mice.
A plastic trap with peanut butter is extremely effective (the cheese thing seems to be US Tom & Jerry?).
A terrier or ferret is alleged to be better for outside rodents, I've not tried that.
Certainly an off the shelf $10 module will detect a trap being sprung. I've found that peanut butter works within a day of spotting a mouse. The rats are a little more suspicious. A large drop door cage with bird mix "glued" on the trigger plate using peanut butter works best for rats, especially in the garden. Accidentally caught birds can just be released. Though dealing with a large, scared and angry live rat in a cage may be a problem for some people.
A terrier or ferret is alleged to be better for outside rodents, I've not tried that.
We have a Yorkie who's basically an inside dog. Yet, she will kill any mouse that gets into the house and doesn't fall for one the old-fashioned traps, She then bringa me the corpse for her reward. No missing parts, just one dead as a doornail mouse. Her reward... praise, a tummy rub, and treat. She'll then prance around the house looking all smug and happy.
She wasn't taught this.. she just does it. No playing with mouse, no chewing it up. Just a very efficient and happy little mouse killer.
Of course it is the best for the customers. their customers *have to* be fools. And it is demonstrated that fools can't be trusted with money.
So, this company is in the business of parting fools from their money before they do anything with it. Looks ok to me.
seriously - if you have some beer brewing and dont cover it properly the little buggers are attracted by the smell and will drop in and the CO2 sorts them out asap. To make it more efficient you just need some see-saw things round the lip to tip them in.
If you homebrew cider I believe it will dissolve the bastards and improve the flavour.
If you homebrew cider I believe it will dissolve the bastards and improve the flavour.
Somewhere in the house we have an old countryside recipe book. Amongst other theings, it has a recipe for "Cock[1] Ale". Which includes adding some chicken[2] meat to the brew a day or so after the yeast in order to add extra body.
[1] Stop sniggering at the back you. Yes - you.
[2] Most likely from cockerel long past it's cook-by date. Aparently, male chicken meat from older birds isn't particularly nice. Once they are too old to err.. 'perform' then they are pretty much too old to eat. Or at least, without lots of suspicious foreign spices[3][ anyway.
[3] You know - the stuff that we liberated from poor foreigners in the Indian Subcontinent. It was for their own good, honest!
A cat in good working order will not only catch many mice but dispose of them in the area before dropping the waste into the garden of someone you don't like.
However, cats of that calibre are pretty rare and as described above what you'll probably get is one lazy fat cat that might catch a mouse but will only bite it until it bleeds a bit then smack it round your kitchen for a while until it expires. Then the fat lazy cat will eat some of the mouse before it remembers that it really prefers your dinner and will leave the arsehole, lower intestines + contents and the odd kidney in a bloody smear in the middle of the floor before regurgitating the whole lot (plus more) into several piles around the room preferably on any bags / shoes you forgot to remove. Then the cat will take a horrific dump in the litter tray (or corner of the room depending on how evil your cat is) before sloping off to sleep and moult on your stuff somewhere else.
And I've two of the little bastards
"[...] a battery and a flashing LED"
A spare radio bell push with the button held down. Then a switched wire jumper in the battery compartment. Might be annoying when the bell rings in the middle of the night though.
I use a system like that triggered by a photocell detector - to tell me when the post/courier has arrived. The bell pushes have two chime settings so there is differentiation between "visitor alarm" and "ringing door bell".
An ordinary mousetrap, humane or deadly and something like an Amazon button (£5) pressed when the trap closes would do pretty much exactly the same for a significantly lower cost.
"Honey! We caught another mouse in the trap yesterday!"
"How do you know?"
"Another box of Andrex has just been delivered to the front door."
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Had one that dug a hole through the plasterboard and then ran up and down the walls for weeks - the cats could never catch the little bugger because they couldn't fit between the cooker and the cupboard the mouse went behind so I put a few "humane" traps down under the cupboards, where the cats couldn't go, with the intent of releasing him back into the woods behind the house from whence he came.
The little bar steward pulled rockwool insulation from the cavity walls and stuffed it in the traps.
In the end I had to poison him (and yes it was definitely a male - else we'd have been overrun by the little ****s!)...
I live out in the sticks and mice are common. Either in the walls or in the attic you can hear them. But it's the rats in the attic that tends to keep us awake at night. Loud buggers with clogs on.
I have rat traps in the attic and one went off the other night - 1:44. damn thing was determined to get out and was rattling the cage to the point where I had to grab ladders and remove the trap from the attic. it was a mouse. https://goo.gl/photos/cfud5ELm6bkXV96WA
Drove 1/2 mile up the road to release it
"Drove 1/2 mile up the road to release it"
On kibbutz I was woken one night by a mouse running over my thin sheet. We tried to eject it next day with brooms as aggressive guides - which accidentally knocked it unconscious. Took it a distance outside - and next day the body had disappeared.
That established a precedent when the women in the next hut came asking for the pest removal service. A very large furry grey and white striped spider - the sort you see in horror films. Persuaded it into a can and released it some distance outside.
Sitting down to accept a coffee reward - one of the women suddenly screamed and jumped on her bed. A large brown scorpion was prowling across the floor. My hand was not quite so steady trapping this creature in the can before releasing it a long way away.
Drove 1/2 mile up the road to release it
That's what my missus does with the excess slugs and snails that she finds in the garden (I won't let her poison or squish them).
Well - minus the drive bit - they get deposited in the woods when we take the dogs for a walk there. It's about a mile away and there's a big lake between us and them..
"It's about a mile away and there's a big lake between us and them.."
Next time - mark the snail' shells with nail varnish or some similar waterproof marker. Experiments have shown that snails will home back to your garden. Mind you the report suggests more than 20 metres is sufficient displacement.
http://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/items/se/131752.html
For a mere fraction of that price you can make your own trap that can catch lots before needing to be 'reset':
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=rotating+bottle+trap
and it is designed to catch gullible idiots with money.
It is brilliant though, rather than just catching and then releasing the customer, it alerts Rentokil to many more milking opportunities over time such as
IoT Wasp/Flying insect killer (internet insectocutor),
IoT Crawling insect killer,
IoT Dryrot detector,
IoT Wetrot detector,
IoT Boring beetle detector
Rentokil should be able to take at least £10K per mug punter before their relatives put a stop to it.
"Rentokil should be able to take at least £10K per mug punter before their relatives put a stop to it."
Many years ago we had a problem with a rebuild incorporating a beam that had been sitting in the timber yard for too long. When the beam dried out it produced a magnificent crop of fungi. The builders replaced the beam - but it was decided that residual spores might be a future problem.
So Rentokil came in to do their sterilising treatment - which their brochures said many times over was "guaranteed". A year later there came a "renewal" notice for insurance against outbreaks of fungi. Turns out there was no definition of what they were guaranteeing. You have to pay them every year if you want them to do anything about a recurrence - and the premium is double if you have ever had such a problem. A nice earner.
Rentokil should be able to take at least £10K per mug punter before their relatives put a stop to it.
You must know my sister-in-law! If they can do one which can catch a spider and then alert her male relatives to come round to empty it, she'll be hammering on their door to give them her life savings.
For £1,300 it'll be a hell of a lot cheaper to just go around the exterior of the house and fill in the cracks with silicone caulk and spray-insulation. Replace / re-attach the mesh screen with liquid tar (or whatever that glue is called now). Also, ensuring that the weather seals on doors and windows are in good repair and are of the right sizes.
As for the interior, put all your food into air-tight containers and make sure the trash receptacle is sealed. Do that for 1-2 months and any rodents inside would starve, getting rid of those. Although you should be sealing food anyway to keep it fresh.
Why spend £1,300 to catch mice in the building when it'd be cheaper to just fix the place to prevent them from entering in the first place. Plus doing those fixes would keep out insects, birds, other pests while helping to keep in heat.
Regular mouse traps exists because they are a cheap solution to the problem that sealing buildings can be expensive. But this contraption is more expensive than that problem, especially since you'll most likely need more than one of the damned things.
From wikipedia.....
The Company was founded in 1925 by Harold Maxwell-Lefroy, Professor of entomology at Imperial College, London, who had been investigating ways to kill Death watch beetles that had infested Westminster Hall, next door to the Houses of Parliament. Lefroy and his assistant produced an anti-woodworm fluid called Ento-Kill Fluids ("ento" coming from the Latin name for insect). In 1925 he tried to register the name Entokill, but due to existing trademarks, had to choose Rentokil instead
Back a whiles, we had a problem with mice in the kitchen. A friend took a standard 2l plastic coke bottle, cut off the top third, inverted it and duct taped it back on. He then put some minced sausage at the bottom of the bottle and taped it upright to the side of the kitchen cabinet.
Next morning we found that the mice had dropped into the bottle via the inverted top and were awaiting disposal. Total cost - something like 15p + sausage, as the mice had eaten the sausage and the bottle couldn't be recycled.
That's a saving of £1,29.85
Trap consists of mouse-sized xbox hooked up to the web, and a big plate of hot dogs, pizza and choccy bars. Mouse dead of cholesterol poisoning in three hours.
If you are baiting a trad trap, peanut butter works much better than cheese and if you deploy glue traps the caught rodents are easiest put out of their misery by drowning them in a water-filled baggie.
Death to mice in the house. Filthy animals. Will sit in a bucket of birdseed pissing on the stuff as they eat it (so much for *that* myth about animals being better than people).
www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-38999403
1. Sell product
2. Slurp then Sell more product
3. Slurp then Sell your info to Ad-men
4. Freebee (no cost to you): Leak your location and other critical info to cybercrims / govts... Through being hacked or via rogue insiders copying data to USB and selling it on dark marketplaces etc.
* Some are celebrating this future. I guess that happens when its possible to sell IoT sh1t with zero liability.
* Regulators / Politicians / Mass-media / Retailers all complicit or asleep.
* F*uck the direction technology is headed, its all power of nightmares!
Ah, at last! A business case for the amount of money we are spending on building a new extension to replace our old, falling down, and definitely not mouse-proof old utility room.
I never realised how much money I was spending on those mousetraps I had to buy every winter. Tanks to Rentokil I now realise that the new mouse-proof extension will pay for itself!
Sounds like we need to use the high tech approach pioneered in Japan.
Long pipe connected to a vat of LN2 with a negative pressure gradient, when trap triggers the vacuum sucks mouse into pipe, depositing it into LN2 vat and freezing it in less than a second.
Simplez!
Plus no mess to clean up, mouse feels nothing apart from ice-cold LN2 insta-death (tm)
1. Sell product
2. Slurp then Sell more product
3. Slurp then Sell your info to Ad-men
4. Freebee (no cost to you): Leak your location and other critical info to cybercrims / govts... Through being hacked or via rogue insiders copying data to USB and selling it on dark marketplaces etc.
* Some are celebrating this future. I guess that happens when its possible to sell IoT sh1t with zero liability.
* Regulators / Politicians / Mass-media / Retailers all complicit or asleep.
* F*ck the direction technology is headed, its all power of nightmares!
So this is, essentially, an anti-quantum trap designed to catch Schrödinger's mouse (which simultaneously is and isn't dead in the trap until you look) by constantly collapsing the wave function to a known state...? Okay, but I can make the same thing for $5 with a net-connected ESP8266...