deadly_pudding posted:

Anyway, are there some other steps that would be a good idea to take? I'm not really comfortable with trying to seal the gaps around those heat pipes. How flammable is that expanding foam that comes in a can?

deadly_pudding posted:

Anyway, are there some other steps that would be a good idea to take? I'm not really comfortable with trying to seal the gaps around those heat pipes. How flammable is that expanding foam that comes in a can? And also, like, who knows where else they might be coming from. That's just where I've seen them come and go from a couple times.

MikeCrotch posted:

Have you considered getting a mean ol' loving cat OP?

rndmnmbr posted:

Snap-traps are the gold standard for a reason. You just have to bait and place them right.

Step one, clean your house. I'm sure you're a normal person and not a goony hoarder, but everyone still has the odd empty box and spots that don't get thoroughly cleaned all the time. Mice are here because there's something for them to eat, be it in your apartment or someone else's, so you need to make the place shine like an OCD neatfreak, and keep it that way until the mice are gone. Starve them out. Make sure there is no standing water for them to drink, either. Mice climb like mountaineers, so shake your curtains out and tie them up just below the windowsill, same with and dangling cords from your blinds, or power cables, or anything at all they can use to get height. If you can't, then put a trap at the top of their climb. Mop all hard surfaces with a strong bleach solution, and especially scrub around the baseboards. Shampoo your carpet, again with special attention along the baseboards.

Skip the peanut butter. Yes, mice love it, but they have a nasty tendency to lick it off the trigger without setting off the trap. Instead, get cheap white bread, the soft and gummy kind loaded with preservatives. Notice how the trigger is looped, and make sure you shove a good bit of bread into that loop. Mice like to carry their food off to eat it, so they'll sink their teeth in and pull, setting off the trap.

thrakkorzog posted:

There's any easy work around to make the snap traps work with peanut butter. Wrap some string around the trigger, and smear peanut butter all over the trigger.

We're not trying to catch cartoon mice where they cleverly walk away with giant slices of cheese, we're trying to get rid of vermin. If you're an eligible bachelor you should have some sort of emergency sewing kit in case of loose buttons and what not. If you don't have that handy, you can buy spools of thread for like two bucks at the local WalMart.

Take some thread and and loosely wind it around the trigger while smearing peanut butter all over the trigger. The mice will inevitably try chewing on the peanut butter, tug on the thread, and get a short sharp shock.

rndmnmbr posted:

Eh, seems like a lot of effort when pretty much everyone has some cheap white bread laying around. But whatever floats your boat, just make sure to get whatever you use under the little loop of metal.

rndmnmbr posted:

rndmnmbr posted:

Snap-traps are the gold standard for a reason. You just have to bait and place them right.

Step one, clean your house. I'm sure you're a normal person and not a goony hoarder, but everyone still has the odd empty box and spots that don't get thoroughly cleaned all the time. Mice are here because there's something for them to eat, be it in your apartment or someone else's, so you need to make the place shine like an OCD neatfreak, and keep it that way until the mice are gone. Starve them out. Make sure there is no standing water for them to drink, either. Mice climb like mountaineers, so shake your curtains out and tie them up just below the windowsill, same with and dangling cords from your blinds, or power cables, or anything at all they can use to get height. If you can't, then put a trap at the top of their climb. Mop all hard surfaces with a strong bleach solution, and especially scrub around the baseboards. Shampoo your carpet, again with special attention along the baseboards.

Skip the peanut butter. Yes, mice love it, but they have a nasty tendency to lick it off the trigger without setting off the trap. Instead, get cheap white bread, the soft and gummy kind loaded with preservatives. Notice how the trigger is looped, and make sure you shove a good bit of bread into that loop. Mice like to carry their food off to eat it, so they'll sink their teeth in and pull, setting off the trap.

Placement: two traps a inch or two apart, triggers side against the wall. This gets the mice who run along the wall and ignore the trap too. Two of them because mice are canny little fuckers who jump pretty good. Anywhere you notice mice, place two traps there. Then place more along your baseboards, and in your cabinets, and under furniture, and behind poo poo where mice like to hide. They're fifty cents a trap so go hog wild. I cleared out the worst mouse infestation I ever saw in three days with sixty traps, killing something like two hundred mice. Sheer numbers is the key to making snap traps work, and the reason they don't work for so many people - you need saturation when you're using them.

When you think you're done... well, you're not, but you can move along to follow up. Wind down on the traps, dropping the ones kids and pets can find, but keep the ones in hiding spots. Buy a bucket of Tomcat bait station refills (but not the bait stations themselves, they're loving useless) and toss one in every cabinet, hole in the wall, nook and cranny and dark corner that kids and pets can't reach. Check the poison every couple of days, one mouse can eat an entire block before it kills them. Be prepared to clean up blood smears, mouse poison is warfarin or a derivative thereof and works by making them bleed to death. Find every single hole they could come through, and stuff it with steel wool - mice can come through a crack as small as a quarter inch.

Is all of this excessive? No. Mice are sexually mature at six weeks, and a female can have up to ten litters per year with around six to ten pups each, so it's very likely that your "two" are more like thirty or forty, plus pups in the nest. No mercy. Trap the gently caress out of them, put poison down for any survivors, and seal your house against more invaders.

Sitting around with a BB gun shooting the bastards, and watching them die with a smile on your face is not recommended, but if you hate them as much as I do, it can be a pleasant and relaxing experience.

e. Let me speak out against "humane" mouse traps as well. The little spinning ones can't be reset, and are expensive, so in my mind they're only useful as a first-line defense if you don't already have a mouse problem. Glue traps, either the mouse will starve to death, which is cruel, or more likely it'll rip free and go about it's business (less a lot of fur). Live traps, mice can track their way "home", so be prepared to dump live mice out at least five miles from your house - also expensive, so you can't get good saturation with them.

Skip it. Don't bother with traps that don't kill or kill and try to hide the dead body. Mice are cute, but they're still disease-ridden vermin that will destroy your stuff (and take a look at their teeth, then tell me how cute they are). Cheap Victor snap-traps are the ticket - and not the ones with the giant yellow paddle for a trigger (you can't bait them worth poo poo - it has to take some effort to get the bait off, or the mice will never trigger the trap), but the cheaper ones with a looped copper trigger, with bait shoved under the loop.

rndmnmbr posted:

Some coldblooded poo poo

rndmnmbr posted:

Snap-traps are the gold standard for a reason. You just have to bait and place them right.

Step one, clean your house. I'm sure you're a normal person and not a goony hoarder, but everyone still has the odd empty box and spots that don't get thoroughly cleaned all the time. Mice are here because there's something for them to eat, be it in your apartment or someone else's, so you need to make the place shine like an OCD neatfreak, and keep it that way until the mice are gone. Starve them out. Make sure there is no standing water for them to drink, either. Mice climb like mountaineers, so shake your curtains out and tie them up just below the windowsill, same with and dangling cords from your blinds, or power cables, or anything at all they can use to get height. If you can't, then put a trap at the top of their climb. Mop all hard surfaces with a strong bleach solution, and especially scrub around the baseboards. Shampoo your carpet, again with special attention along the baseboards.

Skip the peanut butter. Yes, mice love it, but they have a nasty tendency to lick it off the trigger without setting off the trap. Instead, get cheap white bread, the soft and gummy kind loaded with preservatives. Notice how the trigger is looped, and make sure you shove a good bit of bread into that loop. Mice like to carry their food off to eat it, so they'll sink their teeth in and pull, setting off the trap.

Placement: two traps a inch or two apart, triggers side against the wall. This gets the mice who run along the wall and ignore the trap too. Two of them because mice are canny little fuckers who jump pretty good. Anywhere you notice mice, place two traps there. Then place more along your baseboards, and in your cabinets, and under furniture, and behind poo poo where mice like to hide. They're fifty cents a trap so go hog wild. I cleared out the worst mouse infestation I ever saw in three days with sixty traps, killing something like two hundred mice. Sheer numbers is the key to making snap traps work, and the reason they don't work for so many people - you need saturation when you're using them.

When you think you're done... well, you're not, but you can move along to follow up. Wind down on the traps, dropping the ones kids and pets can find, but keep the ones in hiding spots. Buy a bucket of Tomcat bait station refills (but not the bait stations themselves, they're loving useless) and toss one in every cabinet, hole in the wall, nook and cranny and dark corner that kids and pets can't reach. Check the poison every couple of days, one mouse can eat an entire block before it kills them. Be prepared to clean up blood smears, mouse poison is warfarin or a derivative thereof and works by making them bleed to death. Find every single hole they could come through, and stuff it with steel wool - mice can come through a crack as small as a quarter inch.

Is all of this excessive? No. Mice are sexually mature at six weeks, and a female can have up to ten litters per year with around six to ten pups each, so it's very likely that your "two" are more like thirty or forty, plus pups in the nest. No mercy. Trap the gently caress out of them, put poison down for any survivors, and seal your house against more invaders.

Sitting around with a BB gun shooting the bastards, and watching them die with a smile on your face is not recommended, but if you hate them as much as I do, it can be a pleasant and relaxing experience.

e. Let me speak out against "humane" mouse traps as well. The little spinning ones can't be reset, and are expensive, so in my mind they're only useful as a first-line defense if you don't already have a mouse problem. Glue traps, either the mouse will starve to death, which is cruel, or more likely it'll rip free and go about it's business (less a lot of fur). Live traps, mice can track their way "home", so be prepared to dump live mice out at least five miles from your house - also expensive, so you can't get good saturation with them.

Skip it. Don't bother with traps that don't kill or kill and try to hide the dead body. Mice are cute, but they're still disease-ridden vermin that will destroy your stuff (and take a look at their teeth, then tell me how cute they are). Cheap Victor snap-traps are the ticket - and not the ones with the giant yellow paddle for a trigger (you can't bait them worth poo poo - it has to take some effort to get the bait off, or the mice will never trigger the trap), but the cheaper ones with a looped copper trigger, with bait shoved under the loop.

deadly_pudding posted:

They seem to be getting in and out of the apartment via the gaps in the floor around the heating pipes.