What Attracts Mice into Your Home and How Can it Be Stopped?
With over 30 years of experience in pest control and in tackling vermin problems in properties, Safeguard is more than prepared to give advice on what attracts mice into your interior spaces. We have seen countless cases over the years, noting what has brought each case inside before we come up with the correct solution for removing the mice again. We can even provide free professional advice for our customers on how to stop mice from coming back inside.
Traditionally, we operate as a specialist commercial pest control company, but if you have a large scale problem with mice in a domestic property, we will be happy to take your case into consideration as well. Contact us today if you think there may be a mouse problem somewhere in or around your space and our team can ensure that the problem is taken care of quickly, efficiently and as soon as possible.
Why do you have mice in your house?
There are a number of different things which might attract mice into your home, including:
- Small pieces of food and crumbs which haven’t been properly cleared away
- Improperly sealed containers, either on food for humans or pet food
- Overflowing rubbish bins
- General mess around your property interior, which gives the mice a place to hide
- Available water sources, such as pet water bowls
- Long grass or tall weeds growing in your garden or yard, especially around your property’s foundations
- Cracks and openings in walls
- The warmth and shelter provided by an interior, especially in the colder autumn and winter months
- Odours left behind by mice from previous infestations
- Good nesting material within easy access, such as cotton, dental floss, old newspapers and feathers from pillows or quilts
What mice do when nesting in houses and apartments
Once mice have made their way into a house or an apartment, they will start to find a more permanent shelter and
build a nest. This will usually be in a warm, isolated area, such as in walls, ceilings and attic spaces, with the most likely areas being located near to food sources, such as kitchens and dining rooms. Because of this, you may also find nests behind appliances and in cupboards.
The mice will also spend their time finding food around your home. Mice eat a range of different foods, and will be happy on anything from biscuit crumbs, to peanut butter, chocolate and chocolate spread, bacon, cereals, fruit and crisps.
Physical signs of a mouse problem
Mice are nocturnal, so catching them in your pantry during the day is unlikely, unless your infestation is rather severe. However, signs such as chewed boxes, half-eaten food and crumbs and droppings all determine whether you have a problem with mice.
Mouse droppings and urine in your interior will be a very blatant sign that you have an infestation. These will both build up over time if unmanaged, causing odour and other hygiene issues in your property.
You may also start to notice smeared marks and lines appearing along your skirting boards, which is a sign that mice are commonly using that path to travel back and forth in your home. The marks are made by grease coming off a mouse’s fur as they rub along the boards.
How one mouse becomes an infestation
With the combined knowledge that mice can live for up to a year in your home, female mice can be ready to mate again immediately after having a litter (usually between five and six pups) and only have a gestation period of between 19 and 21 days, you can understand why your home may quickly be overrun by a mouse infestation.
Do the mice keep coming back?
If you keep getting rid of mice around your property but they keep returning, it is likely that you haven’t gotten rid of the thing which is attracting them in the first place. There may be a number of different solutions to this.
How to prevent mice from entering your home
Just as there are a number of things which may attract mice into your home, there are also a number of things that you can do as a property owner to prevent them from coming in:
- Storing food properly in plastic or metal containers
- Regularly cleaning spaces which see a lot of food, especially under appliances and inside kitchen cupboards
- Keeping your home tidy to prevent mice from hiding under clutter
- Regularly weeding and tidying your garden or yard to give them fewer places to hide outside
- Sealing up or covering holes, gaps and cracks in walls, vents and pipes
- Fixing any damage in your roofing, including using wire mesh to seal up gaps
- Setting out commercial traps and bait or poison to remove them from your home
If you do these and find that mice are still returning to your property, or you are worried that your infestation might be too large for a store-bought remedy to be effective, it will be time to call a professional pest control service to provide the thorough solution you need.
Our services for removing mice from your property
Safeguard provides a range of exceptional services for a number of homes and any businesses that have a mouse problem. From methodical but humane removal services, to providing effective rodent deterrents and repellents, we ensure that you can feel comfortable in your own space without having to listen to scratches in the walls or find droppings again. We will even offer you free, expert advice on what our customers can do to keep their properties pest-free in the future.
Our services for mouse control include:
- Identifying signs of large scale mouse problems in houses, apartments, gardens or yards
- Finding areas where a mouse may enter your property, providing advice and prevention methods that will keep mice away
- Mouse nest removal
- Essential mouse prevention methods
- A comprehensive guide to the most useful mouse prevention tools and products
How our service works
We will begin by conducting a professional survey of your property and its surrounding area ‒ our work always starts by assessing the severity of your infestation. To do this, one of our trained and qualified technicians will come to your property and carry it out.
This work should take between half an hour and a full hour and will always be done at a time which is most convenient for you. You will never have to worry about our member of staff turning up when you are not available!
We will carry out our work using mouse control treatments that are specific to your needs ‒ every job we carry out for this type of work will be different, as mice can pose a variety of problems for properties. Once our team member has completed an assessment of the situation, they will be able to provide the solution that should see your property cleared. They may even be able to start work right away, but this will depend on the size and severity of the infestation.
The treatments we may use include:
- Mouse-sized bait traps ‒ these use bait to lure the mice into a cage, perfect for humane capture, transport and relocation
- Mouse repellents ‒ these include ultrasonic devices and poison, if necessary
- Rodent Odour Control ‒ this treatment service helps to remove the bad smell which often accompanies large infestations of rats or mice
- Proofing and prevention ‒ just imagine having gotten rid of a worryingly large mouse nest in your property and finally feeling settled again, only for the problem to start over when you hear more mice in your walls! This is where our team can step in and help, because once our technician has identified your infestation and the problem has been resolved, they will also be able to discuss easy, cost-effective methods that help to prevent further pest problems
It must be noted that mouse control for your property will require more than one visit, owing to the nature of the pest control required and additional legal obligations.
We are BPCA-certified
Any time we are called to take care of mice on a property, the job will be carried out by one of our BPCA-certified technicians. This guarantees industry-standard levels of service that will see your property clear, and ensures that all treatments we use adhere to and comply with standard British health and safety regulations.
Each of our team members also understand that every property they visit will have different issues with mice, so you can also be sure that the pest control solution and advice provided will be bespoke and specific to your property’s needs.
Free your home from unwanted rodent pests
Contact our specialist team at Safeguard today to have your home cleared completely of any mouse or mice, whether you live in a house or an apartment, or even need pest control services to take care of an infestation in your garden. Our emergency technicians can even come to your location right away if your problem needs taking care of as soon as possible. So, if you know that the issue in your home is too much to handle, we can deal with it to the professional standards you deserve.
You can rest assured that we’ll swiftly and humanely remove any mouse we find on your property, wherever you are based in our catchment area. We are proud to offer our services across any number of locations in the Midlands, so if your property is in need of our services, we will be there.
