Mice or rats in loft

We used cotton wool balls soaked in peppermint oil and hung around the loft - Mickey and his mates moved out pronto! We refresh every three months or so and haven’t seen hide nor hair of any for at least 18 months.

I hope it is mice, if they get under the insulation and scurry across the ceiling board they sound enormous, rats are a real problem but unless you are adjoining some kind of derelict building are unlikely. For mice just use poison or bait a few traps they will mummify after a week or two.
We did find a plug in deterrent worked in our bungalow, it also keeps spiders away too, so worth trying

annodomini I haven’t seen anything, but the noise overhead when I’m trying to sleep is bad enough - a vivid imagination isn’t the best nightcap

menopaws that’s made me feel decidedly goosebumpy! ??

I had them in my roof in Kenya, 50 years ago. Two cats kept them at bay. But when I went off on a camping trip and sent the cats to a cattery, there was mayhem to come home to. They were a small type of rat, but rats nevertheless and it's quite scary when you open a drawer and a rat jumps out. I went straight away and picked up the cats and everything in sight was disinfected or burnt.

My nephew had rats in the roof of his farm in South Africa. He put a snake up there and that sorted them out!!

I am just so stressed out over the whole thing, it’s making me feel ill. The thought of rotting smells and flies... Just going to have to trust the contractor to sort it.

Old fashioned mousetraps baited with dark chocolate. We caught 13 mice in our loft, they were getting into the cavity through the weep holes between the bricks where the builders had omitted to put in the plastic grilles.

I don’t know about country rats, but rats in my part of the world are signifcantly larger than squirrels.

Might just be mice. The contractors will take care of it, best not to worry if you can avoid it

Thank you. Contractor appointment is booked. They do come back for a return visit after laying poison, (I asked) but only remove what they can see. The lady I spoke to said they obviously have no control over where the animals die, and they do tend to “tuck themselves away” as she reassuringly put it. I’m really hoping it isn’t rats ?? It sounds a bit lightweight up there to be squirrels, but I don’t know....

Get a contractor in ASAP. Squirrels? The chew and cause real damage

Have always used poison in my various rented hovels over the years and never had a problem.

The contractor who came for the rats told me the warfarin makes them head to a water source so as long as their water source is not in the walls, you should be okay. We never came across any rats or a smell.

They do come back for repeat visits to check for success and bodies.

As the mice often die under insulation materials, there is no way that a contractor would spend much of his/ her time looking for an unknown number of dead bodies.
Most new poisons mummify the bodies, in theory this means that the smell isnt too bad and only lasts for a few hours, unless it dies next to a heating pipe!
I think if you have rats in the loft then you have a much bigger problem than if it’s mice.

I may be wrong about this, Gma29, but I think whoever comes to put down the poison will do a repeat visit to check for success and therefore remove any dead rats they find. I'm sure I saw this happen on one of those tv programmes some years ago, when the council came to deal with a rat problem in someone's house. It took several visits, I believe. I would ask them when they come if they do this, explaining that you can't get in the loft yourself to check. Good luck.

We live in quite a rural area too, but this is the first time we’ve had a problem - well, it’s the first time I’ve heard them! I’m hoping the contractor can give us an idea where they’re getting in, so we can try and prevent it again, as I can’t see where.

I’ve been ‘googling’ which isn’t always the best idea, and people with rats have said the smell and flies are appalling and it lasts months. It doesn’t sound as though humane traps are very effective. I can’t get in the loft myself either, (too decrepit).

Well, I use poison and you are right they pong a bit and there are flies, friends of ours use traps and winkle their little crushed bodies out of them and reuse them.........

We tried the humane traps and one morning there were 6 mice in there, DH took them 5 miles away and released them, 2 days later we caught, yep, you’ve guessed it another 5.
I also have the plug in things, they don’t work either.

This summer we are going around the outside of the house trying to stop up all the tiny gaps to try prevention rather than cure, but we live in the countryside and all our neighbours are in the same boat.

I just lay in bed in the Autumn listening to them all above my head moving back in and dragging their little suitcases across the floor ready to settle in for the Winter.

We’ve lived here now for 20 years, we never had mice in any of our ‘town’ houses, so I guess we just live with it, I dread to think what they might be doing to the wiring though.