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Hello, this is Ben with Ben’s pest control. And today we’re doing another episode of the Ben’s pest control podcast. And today I want to talk about rodents, specifically rats, which are very common. In the United States, there is a surge currently going on of roof rats, they’re numbers that appears throughout the country are just popping like crazy. And one of the major companies out there just put a list of the 50 worst cities in the country. And the top 50 were cities, Florida, I believe had five on that list, which makes sense. I mean, we’re in a tropical environment where the rats have don’t do very well. And most of those cities have been major city areas, you know, your Orlando, Jacksonville, Tampa, Miami, those areas all made the list. And well, you know, you got to be prepared. And a lot of what we see right now we talk to homeowners all the time about rats, but you get these homeowners who in some cases, of course, I mean, everybody wants to save money, they don’t want to have to face a large, large fee to take care of something like rats, but give you a couple of examples. We have events, we offer exclusion, and trapping. And we can even in most cases, give a house a one year warranty on our work. But then we have people who don’t want to spend that much. So they decided to go a cheaper way. And we’ve had one earlier this year that the people just wanted us to trap. And we just trapped and trapped and trapped. And by the time they were said and done, they actually spent more just trapping than they would have spent having a seal the house trap. And you know, cover them for one whole year. So sometimes Saving money is great. But other times you kind of got to be careful where you draw the line because it can be actually more expensive to do just to trapping and I just had one today I went to we did trapping about three weeks ago for this people. We thought all the rats out of the house, they didn’t want to pay to have the house sealed up. And now they’re hearing noises again. And they’re right on the water. And the rats really liked the water areas. So I told them the rats were prevalent. And so they have decided that they want to do more trapping, which is fine with us. We don’t have a problem doing the trapping, but it just it’s I kind of feel bad sometimes for people that are are spending money on all the trapping and not just saying listen, let’s get this wrapped up. Let’s get this taken care of. So with the roof rats, you know you may be asked yourself, well, what can we do? One of the things I can tell you is never let any plants touch your house. You don’t want tree limbs touching roof rats are great climber. So if there’s any branches touching, they can come on the roof. And once they get up to the roof, there’s a lot of different places where rats can get in you got vents on the roof. Sometimes you have a ridge vent, and those ridge vents are missing their caps. Other times you have vents for for things like the dryer, heat that vents out of the house, you’ll have vents for bathroom vents, vents for your stove, there can be all sorts of vents that come out through the roof and you have your sewer plumbing stacks. One of the more interesting ones I remember was, there was a TV show that disgust infestations. And the TV show actually did an episode on rats and they had a house that they could not get rid of the rats could not get rid of the rats. And they found that the sewer vent was never properly installed through the roof. It came out in the attic. And over the years, the rats appeared to be coming up through the sewer and coming out that vent pipe and into the attic. And the homeowners to the home had spent 1000s and 1000s of dollars but the sewer pipe couldn’t be seen by anybody. So the sewer pipe was in an area of the attic where there was no access and couldn’t be seen. And the people finally ripped open the ceiling because they got so frustrated with all the money they had spent on rats, and they found this sewer vent pipe and it was just open in the attic. And according to story, I believe they sued and they were reimbursed by the builder for their mistake. But it was quite a lengthy, long process to get to that point. So you’re dealing with creatures that are very well adapted to their environment. They will find ways to get in. And so we talked about let’s go back to the trees you
definitely don’t want the trees to touch You don’t want anything on the roof. You don’t want to give them access if you don’t have to to that area. In some cases, I recommend people to get downspout guards. They sell these guards that go in the bottom of the downspouts that can prevent rats from running up your gutter and having access to the roof. We had one case where the rats were on a roof and they actually chewed through the shingles and the wood of the roof and made their way into the attic. So that was actually on underneath or right on the edge of a solar Pool Heater. But the rats had chewed from the outside right through the roof once they were up there to get into the attic. So they are resilient little creatures. A lot of times we tell people you’ve really got to watch for any hole the size of a quarter in your house or bigger if their head fits through their body will fit through. Keep an eye on things like garage doors, garage doors need to shut tight and seal tight. If they can get in inside under the door, they’ll find their way in. We do have the option for our clients who want to install garage door sweeps that are rodent proof. So if you’re interested in our free 58 Point pest survey and analysis, we’ll be happy to come out and we’ll take a look for any possible entryway for rats. Please give us a call at 772-878-1972 Or feel free to check our website at WWW dot bense pest stop is thank you and have a great day
