How much does a rodent infestation cost?

Potential Damages

An infestation of rats or mice creates a dangerous situation for humans and pets with the threat of disease. Contact with the pests, their droppings or urine can create health hazards, but rat damages costs can mount rapidly. Rats and mice can cause expensive damage to home and business structures, HVAC equipment and wiring in attics and automobiles. 

Creating Fire Hazards 

The perpetual growth of mice and rat teeth makes it essential for them to constantly chew and gnaw on resistant objects. The wiring in homes and businesses provide places for them to gnaw and create hazards. 

Gnawing to Survive 

The comforts of a home that include food, shelter and warmth appeal to rodents as much as they do to humans. Rodents must continually gnaw to keep their teeth short and capable of letting them consume food. The process of gnawing wears their teeth down and prevents them from becoming too long and unusable. When they choose to sharpen their teeth on electrical wires, they gnaw on the hard, plastic insulation that protects the wires from exposure. Without a protective covering, the exposed wires can create a short in appliances as well as damage to an electrical system. 

Wire Damage

The wires that rats and mice chew inside walls can spark and create the potential for fire. Insurance companies tend to regard rat infestation costs as a responsibility of the home or business owner and do not provide coverage. The loss of a structure to fire represents a devastating expense to a family or business, but effective riddance of rodents with the A24 Rat and Mouse Trap can help eliminate the threat of damaged wires. Automotive wiring with a vegetable coating may attract rodents, creating the need for repairs that can significantly increase rodent damages costs. 

Getting Rid of the Smell 

The stench of a dead mouse or rat creates an unbearable odor that almost no one can tolerate. Many options for do-it-yourself extermination encourage home or business owners to buy snap traps or glue boxes, but they have a common failing that requires retrieval and disposal of the corpse. Poisons do not make a rodent leave a building in search of water but cause them to find a place to die between the structure’s walls. The expense of eliminating the insufferable smell may start with removing sections of wall to gain access to it. A day’s pay for a carpenter to replace the walls costs more than the purchase of an A24.

Exterminators 

Home Advisor puts the average price for an exterminator at $326 and the high end at $1,000. The need to rid a home or business location of the dreadful small makes cost irrelevant, but the A24 Rat and Mouse Trap can prevent the situation from occurring in the first place. It drops the body below the unit where it awaits disposal after an instantaneous and humane death. Equally effective outdoors or inside a home or business, it takes only a few seconds to painlessly dispatch a rodent, reset and continue working. 

Ionizers and Odor Removal Bags 

Without even a remote possibility of remaining in a home or business location until the residual smell dissipates, owners have several ways to deal with the elimination of putrid odors. The decomposition process releases sulfur dioxide and methane into the air with the horrid odors of death that last for days or weeks. Odor removal bags that contain charcoal and cost less than $20 each can start reducing the smell when hung in areas where it persists most strongly. Air ionizers can help as well, and their prices range from about $50 to $200 or more. The intensity of the smell dictates the expense of managing rodent damages costs. 

Sustaining Structural Damage 

An adage suggesting that “what you do not know cannot hurt you” can give homeowners a false sense of security when it may mean ignoring a rodent infestation. In the absence of recognizing a real and present danger, owners can experience extensive structural damage to a home or business when rats and mice attract little attention. By the time that their presence makes someone take notice, much damage may have already occurred. 

Getting Inside 

The Centers for Disease Control cites that a mouse can enter through a hole the “size of a nickel,” and rats can fit through a half dollar size opening. Areas that may hide holes that allow entry where rat damages costs can begin include those behind cabinets, inside closets, around pipes and vents, in the attic or basement and floor drains. A do-it-yourself project to seal them may help prevent significant expenses later. An A24 Rat and Mouse Trap in targeted locations can make sure that any rodent that gets inside does not live long. 

Foundation

Rats and mice can successfully attack any building material when they gnaw through it or undermine it with burrows. The potential for underground excavations that cause a foundation to shift may represent one of the most expensive repairs that they cause. When anything disrupts the soil underneath a foundation, a building needs underpinning to shore it up, a complicated process that costs thousands of dollars to repair damages. 

Walls, Roof & Insulation 

Rats and mice can chew through structural wood to enter roofs and attics to find warm and dry spaces, creating access points for water and other pests. They can attack the sealant around chimneys and solar panels that require a roofer to provide repairs that increase mice damages costs. Once inside a home, they can burrow into the insulation or pull it apart to make nests, all the time leaving their urine and droppings that create a noxious smell. As they remove or destroy insulation, cold pockets can result in reducing its effectiveness. The drywall presents no challenge to their incisor teeth to damage or destroy it. 

The cost of blown-in insulation by a professional for a 1500 square foot home ranges from $1500 to $2000 or about $500 for a do-it-yourself project. The cost of an A24 Rat and Mouse Trap for less than $200 can save homeowners large sums to repair rat and mice damages. When a structure no longer presents a deterrent to invasion, rat infestation costs can include furniture, precious heirlooms, carpets or any material that they choose. 

Protecting the Heating and Ventilation System 

The ductwork in a home or business provides a private runway that lets rats and mice travel anywhere, leaving their health hazards behind and destroying property as they go. The material in ductwork lets them make perfect nests. Their dander, droppings, and urine can create allergic reactions to anyone and especially the young and elderly who may have respiratory issues. A dead rodent in the ductwork creates one of the worst possible situations as it spreads a putrid odor and germs throughout a home. Labor and materials for ductwork can amount to $35 to $55 per linear foot or from $1,000 to $5,000 for a home for mice damages costs. 

Choosing an Effective Alternative 

At Automatic Trap, we offer an affordable solution to rodent infestation with an effective and humane method that curtails rodent damages costs. For indoor or outdoor use, the A24 Automatic Trap performs efficiently under any weather conditions. Small, lightweight and easy to install, it rids a home of hazardous rodents without the hassle of snap traps, glue boxes or poisons. We ship daily to the United States and Canada.