Why baiting for mice without sealing is a subscription

A house does not have a mouse problem. It has a gap problem, and mice are what the gap lets in. That distinction decides whether you are hiring someone once or paying them forever.

The arithmetic of a gap

A house mouse gets through an opening a little over a quarter of an inch, which is roughly the diameter of a pencil. A young rat needs about half an inch. Most houses have several openings that size and their owners have never looked for them, because they are in the places nobody looks.

• Where the dryer vent meets the siding
• Around the air conditioning line set where it enters the wall
• The gap under a garage door seal that has gone hard
• Utility penetrations for gas, water and cable
• Weep holes in brick, and the corners of soffit returns
• Crawl space vents with rusted screen

What baiting alone does

Bait kills the mice currently inside. It does nothing about the opening, so the population outside refills the space, usually within weeks in autumn when they are looking for somewhere warm. The bait station then reads as “still active” at the next quarterly visit, which reads as “you still need us”.

Nobody has to be dishonest for this to happen. It is simply what the method produces.

What exclusion involves

Finding the openings takes an hour with a torch and a mirror, inside and out. Sealing them is not pest control, it is small carpentry: copper mesh or steel wool packed into the void, then mortar, sheet metal or expanding foam over it depending on the surface. Mice chew through foam alone, so foam on its own is theatre.

Then you trap what is already inside, and you check again in a fortnight to confirm activity has stopped.

How to tell which you are being sold

Ask one question: where are they getting in?

A company doing exclusion will answer with specific places on your specific house, and will usually have photographs. A company doing bait maintenance will answer with a general statement about rodent pressure in the area.

Both answers can come from perfectly decent technicians. Only one of them ends.

What we do

We survey the exterior before quoting anything, seal what we find, then trap. Exterior stations get maintained on the plan afterwards, because pressure from outside is real and permanent. The difference is that the stations are catching what is outside rather than feeding what is inside.