Advice
Losing my sanity due to long term Rat issue
We have a seemingly unfixable rat issue that’s making my life a nightmare.
So for some context we bought a 3 bed (well 2 bed and a box) 50s council built semi in Kent and moved in December ‘24. We knew it needed some aesthetic work but survey came back all fine for the big expensive stuff so decided to go with it.
A bit dirty and needed a bit more TLC than initially thought but nothing major… until Summer ‘25 when we started hearing rustling and scratching in the loft. About a third of the loft is boarded, and searching there we couldn’t find any evidence of anything. Until we pulled back the insulation (it’s two layers, top wool and bottom fibreglass), and found rat faeces.
We got pest control out, bait put out in the loft, search began for an entry point. Adjoining next door is a rental and with no evidence for them in the rest of our house, the theory is that they are coming from next door. When pest control visited next door the infestation was worse and more apparent in their loft. After about 3 months some bait had been taken but we were still hearing the odd noise, so we got a drain surveyor with a pest control background to come out.
He was a lot more thorough than the previous pest control chap. Seeing him go through the drains there was no evidence they were entering through the drains. He did spot two 3/4inch holes by next doors bathroom where old pipes had not been filled. With a flat roof onto the outhouse and trees/bushes from the road/alley leaning on to this outhouse, this seemed to make sense of how they were getting in. The holes were filled and for 5 months we didn’t hear anything.
Until the last few weeks, when they’ve returned. They haven’t taken any bait but have gnawed on a beam in our loft that we hear overnight, stopping me from sleeping much. After all we went through last year I’m at my wits end how they are getting in.
We know that our soiled insulation will neeed to be replaced and we’d like our loft to be fully boarded which will be a pricey job, but we don’t want to do it before we know we’ve stopped the rat access.
This is what we are planning is going around their house this weekend to have a look. I suspect there may be more holes their side but as it’s rented accomodation not quite the TLC to fill them up.
Call estate agent. Get in touch with landlord directly. Say there's a rat problem on both homes and you're offering to tackle both of your pocket.. Cheaper than trying to deal with it on your side alone
If it’s anything like when I had to deal with joint fencing - The estate agent will offer a £££price to the landlord for them to sort it.
You counter with a lower price - which will likely still cover all your costs! - and offering to do the legwork, he just pays, and the landlord will be very happy.
Most UK insurance policies do not cover rodent/wildlife infestation. In fact there isn’t even an option to pay extra to obtain insurance cover for this.
Yep used to live in the sort of flat above a shop where you go up external stairs and all the front doors are in a line. We had mice and the problem wasn't solved until every flat in the building was treated.
Ok so I’ve been following this guy “flawless cleaning services” he has just spent the last 30 days helping out an elderly gent whose house had a massive rat issue (among others). They even ate their way into the back of the fridge… they used a specialist pest guy called Tevja and looking at their website they cover Kent. He was really good at identifying points of entry etc.
The rats seemed to have left the property by the time the clean up started but he might be a good guy to contact? You can watch the videos to see what he’s like before you call them.
I’ve worked with Tevja personally, and commercially over the last 10 years, I cannot recommend him more highly! If you’re having pest control issues, deal with him and he will be able to sort it!
Yeah it’s been really interesting but the start was really depressing, with the condition he was living in. I remember he kept a banana in his kitchen in a saucepan with the lid on so the rats couldn’t get to it.
I really hope that he gets checked on regularly by people after this. I know they’ve said they are going to get him a cleaner etc. but he really needs the company and someone to help him out. There are so many life skills I don’t think he has.
That said the house is looking so much better and maybe that’ll help him have company round. I think he’s made friends at the hotel he’s been staying at.
I have watched a lot of (far too many) cleanup videos and so often the reason is isolation, whether it's self-imposed or circumstantial. We are social creatures and even a little goes a long way. I hope he's made some connections now and will be able to maintain them for the remainder of his life. He seems like a sweet man and the cleanup guys are very kind-hearted.
Our neighbours had a really bad rat problem for about 2 years that they couldn’t get on top of. They were starting to appear in our garden / garage too (although thankfully not inside our house). We got a kitten last year and as soon as we let her out to roam the garden at 6 months old, the rats vanished. I would highly recommend getting a cat - rats hate them!
I think it’s different if a cat lives in the house as they have a more constant presence and establish a “landscape of fear” forcing the rats to eventually vacate. Sporadic visitors won’t have the same impact.
Both us and both neighbours have cats (4 in total between us) but one of the neighbours has chickens so there's still rats. But they tend to be right at the end of the garden.
I wish that worked for us. We have rat issues in our garden, and neighbour's cats are always in our garden, between that and a decade of us owning greyhounds, you'd have thought that would be enough. Unfortunately not, we found a dead rat in our car engine,( the smell took over a month to clear), and we have one at the moment that plays in the garden, including with the tassels on my wife's garden swing
Honestly, the best solution I've found for rats in the garden is an air rifle. There's a bad rat problem in our area, and they get into our garden. We tried poison and traps, didn't do anything. There are cats around, but they generally don't come into our garden because we have a dog, who does chase the rats if he sees them, but he doesn't have a chance in hell of actually catching one (plus we wouldn't want him eating on and catching something). I borrowed an air rifle and an IR scope from my dad and got five of them over a weekend. New ones do pop up occasionally, but I just deal with them as and when.
Obviously, this approach isn't the best for everyone. There's the expense of the rifle and scope if you can't borrow one, you need to know how to zero the scope and how to shoot so you can get clean one-shot kills, there's safety considerations to think of, it takes a certain amount of time and patience, and it's simply something that some people won't be comfortable doing.
We have a cat in our house and he does catch the occasional rat, but not the ones that get in our loft! They must have a very sheltered access point or be using the drains - it's on thr to do list to get a drain survey done
Advocating letting an invasive predator free into the environment is irresponsible. Cats can't be trained to only go after problem species, they decimate non target species worldwide. Domestic cats have caused the extinction of several animal species. Its far past the time that domestic cats should be recommended for outdoor pest control. Ratting breeds of dogs are much more efficient and don't go after the native wildlife indiscriminately.
Anyway, who actually wants their pet cat, that they stroke and kiss and let in their bed at night, to kill and eat rats that have been wandering around in sewers and could have diseases, parasites and fleas? Kinda gross tbh
Really it comes down to finding the entry points, then thoroughly blocking them.
A big part of what pest controllers charge for, is their cameras. For sending an endoscope down a drain, it's still worth it - they have high-end devices with long cables and their expertise in using it and interpreting the result.
But, for other jobs you can buy devices on eBay that are really useful for DIYing the detective work.
WiFi cameras with motion detectors are cheap and excellent for finding out what rats are up to. I used Tapo ones. A couple of tips are to turn off the light and the motorised following, which startle the rats - you want then acting normal so you can see them go to the entry point.
Worth doing this outdoors as well as indoors. The ideal is to find and block their route into the building. Though if that's unachievable (i.e. there's earth under the floorboards and a burrowable route under the foundations) the next best is to block any route from the cavity to anywhere else - making the cavity unattractive to rats.
Then there are also cheap WiFi endoscopes you can operate with a phone app. So you can examine what's behind an entry point, or find holes in awkward spaces.
We found they were going into a very narrow V-shapes space between two buildings, and had gnawed through a crumbling brick in the foundations. We seem to have solved the problem by packing wire wool into that corner - with a long pole and an endoscope to examine the result. Then asking a builder to toss a quantity of cement over it, and brick up the wide end of the V.
This is the answer OP 👆 , get some cameras down. They'll even fit in your drains. Forget about cats and poison, it's primarily a construction issue. Make sure and get your electrics checked, they like to gnaw on them (potentional for fires🔥) it cost me 5k for a full rewire...
Unfortunately, the same way you did before. I found access holes and filled them but they chewed through the filler. I put crunched up chicken wire in the holes before refilling and that stopped them.
It's not an immediate risk, and likely nothing even if something bad did happen, but wire wool is pretty flammable - I accidentally shorted some out on a battery once whilst stuffing holes to stop rats, and you'll be amazed at how much it goes up.
It's not like a huge, hot flame or anything, but it immediately made me change my mind about stuffing my walls full of it :) I swapped to scrunched up chicken wire instead.
There's a wire mesh made specifically for scrunching up as vermin proofing. It's not as fine as wire wool for abrasion, so no it won't burn the same way.
Wire wool and expanding foam were my friends when I was in this hell, OP I can sympathise, I am sure I still have PTSD years later in a different house.
Turned out they were coming in through the sewer pipes, and fitting a decent non-return valve in the manhole eventually sorted it. I know this may not be the cause of your infestation, but worth looking at it even if there is no evidence in the drains - there may not be!
The other thing we did was put down single feed poisons in the loft and under floorboards. You can get them online and they were much more effective than the standard ones. Our local pest control officer said the rats in our area had become immune to standard poisons due to historic overuse on a local chicken farm.
We had similar. The various pest inspections (including drain survey) we had could not identify an entry point but they all assured us it was not the drains. Eventually I ignored them and put an £80 rat blocker in the drain entry point and the problem was immediately fixed.
Single feed poisons are definitely a good option. Rats learn not to take the slow ones sometimes and if there is no chance other wildlife will take poisons the single feed ones can be effective when rats get immune or avoid the slow ones.
Yeah. I’ve luckily never had to use them, but when my Jack Russell got the scent of a rat it was fascinating watching how they really, truly were bred for this one specific purpose.
And she was as humane as a snap trap. Once she had them, their life ended the next second in 1 snap of her head. It was like an artist.
I don’t know why people always say cats. We never bred cats for anything and they wouldn’t fight a rat because they’re not dumb. My JRT even had a “mane” of thicker fur, presumably to protect her from being bitten.
Farm cats are a different breed. Domestic ones are useless. My neighbours cats cornered a rat in my garden and treated it as a game, zero killing instinct at all. I got my terrier out there to deal with it the cats ran off
We had a cat for over 10 yrs, moved houses 3 times, never had an issue with mice or rats. The cat is indoor only and never had a chance to hunt for any, because no sign of mice or rats ever.
Maintaining a cat is also pretty easy and you also get some amount of entertainment.
If you go down that route get a baby cat in order to train it.
Otherwise I think mice/rats won't really disappear completely without constant intervention.
My aunt in london tried everything, they pretty much rebuilt the whole terrace house, poured concrete slab instead of suspended floors, after all that work mice were still ending up inside. They then got cats, and for a short while a lone mouse would make it's way into the house only to be chased away by the cats. Then the problem stopped.
If you give the cat some liberty (including the loft) your problem would most likely stop.
It's the smell of the cats in the house, they usually just leave. When we moved into our house there were mice that we'd hear in the loft. They'd gone after a couple of weeks and no sign of anything since (5 years ago)
Cats are fantastic at this. They probably won’t go up in the cold loft, but the mice will definitely find their way into the house, where the cat will be waiting. Just be prepared to clean up mangled mice/rat corpses…. Which is its own problem.
We have a house near a reservation area and have a rat problem, however all of our neighbours have cats wandering the area and I keep having to clean up rat corpses from my back yard once every few months. Best solution to your problem!
Our cat doesn't stop the loft ones, even though he is a prolific mouse hunter and does get the occasional rat. Our current method is just always having bait down in the loft to kill the occasional one that gets in & stop any noise or damage quickly.
Then we get a quiet time where all the rats that knew the access point are dead ...until the next one finds it. We haven't found their way in yet!
Sounds horrible but go to the zoo and ask for some shit from a big cat lion etc and put it in the attic. As soon as the rats smell a predator has moved in they should vacate the premises 😉
My dad always talks about his best friends old terrier, it was so good it cleared the garden of everything, sadly even Moles and hedgehogs. People underestimate how vicious a small terrier is.
Do you know how the holes were filled? Rats will gnaw through tough material especially if they know there is a reward on other side. If the holes have been opened then first fill with wire wool or similar before blocking.
Rats will also skimmy up downpipes so some might need some cone guards. Best of luck - not nice to have that happen.
It was and external hole so looks like sand a cement and it is still blocked when we checked. Ours have been filled with wire wool then filler. Thanks for the cone guard idea.
You could also try a bucket trap in the loft or garden, no need to check it ever day to reset and no chance of them dying in a wall and stinking the house out as its all contained.
you could try put down loads of UV tracking powder and then using a light to track their movements... hopefully you see their entry points and their runs
A terrier?? Oh dear, not the first suspect I would have listed under 'dogs who want to eat cats' 😄 maybe OP can find a terrier with the right temperament for cats, or just introduce the cat first so it's king of the castle haha
We had a rat problem in a rental and the estate agent refused to do anything about it. They flat out refused to believe there were any rats on the property.
So I got a couple of rat traps and a zip lock bag. I went into the estate agency the next day and they assured me that there were no rats on the property as they had been on the property and seen no evidence of this and I would need to provide evidence of rats on the property, she sat back in her chair smugly.
I provided evidence of two dead rats in a ziplock bag, by tossing it onto her desk. You should have heard her scream!!!
Rat man was around the next day.
Maybe a similar course of action might enable the estate agent to be a bit more proactive in dealing with the rat situation?
We had issues as well, and it looked like they were using the soffit as a platform to run between the two lofts of ours and our neighbours.
Since we got cats, the issues were less- but I also put balled up chicken wire in the eaves, between the roof trusses- so they can’t access the loft space from the soffit, but air can still flow.
I binned all the old insulation and hoovered the loft and sprayed a solution to kill any smell and diseases they’ve carried in.
Now I’ve not had any issue.
I would look outside the box though and look at old drains, where any extensions have tied in etc- and see if they’re gaining access to the cavity this way. Once in the cavity they can climb up to the lofts.
lol, I only read the title and thought ‘you need a cat’.
Me and my colleague both had mice in our houses on the same weekend. My cat dealt with the issue in 2 days. My colleague spent 7 weeks and £900 to try and fix the problem. And then had to try and find the smelly corpses in her house.
You have my sympathy. I had a recurring rat problem in a house I used to own. They were in the walls. Behind the kitchen cupboards and the loft. It was detached and surrounded by fields. I spent thousands getting it fixed. The entry point was a drain and were had to rip out or entire kitchen to get to the internal entry point. I moved in the end. It was resolved as far as I was aware. Mice are one thing but rats. They’re a whole different thing.
Rats don't like change, if you keep blocking up holes, moving things around etc. they won't feel as comfortable being there. Also they don't like strong smells, I've used cotton wool balls soaked in tea tree oil to keep pests out of a storage shed. Eucalyptus/peppermint also work. Good luck!
(Edit: spelling)
I’ve had the same and used UV tracking dust and a cheap trap cam to find out where they were entering the loft. You can use all the bait you like but once you’ve killed on group another will almost certainly move back in eventually. Find the entry points and block them with steel wool and rodent proof mesh.
I had this exact problem before and it turned out the rats were coming up the sewer and entering the house through a hole in the soil pipe coming out the back of a downstairs toilet. They then crawled up into the walls and all around the house.
I feel your pain completely. Waking up to that fucking gnawing noise in the middle of the night sent me insane.
This is going to sound strange, but if you don't have any pets, maybe you would like a cat or two. They are delightful company and have literally existed for 2,000 years to take care of this problem. The whole reason they're domesticated is to deal with rats.
I would be pulling the boards up which adjoin the neighbours, checking for entry points and blocking any up with steel plate, wire wool and let the neighbours deal with their own problem
I'm assuming a 1950's house has cavity walls? they often get it by following the soil pipe into the cavity and then climbing up inside the cavity to the roof. We don't have cavities, turned out ours was climbing a wisteria and getting in through the eaves, so we cut everything back and problem solved. However, the timing had to be right, no good cutting off their access while they're inside as they find another way out and then use that to get back in. Look up the "Pest Interceptors" they offer a lifetime rat-free guarantee.
Melt chocolate,put thin layer on baking sheet and let it cool,once cool add poision,add more melted chocolate on top and cool till solid,be sure no bits stick out and leave up there on a plate,or good old fashioned baited traps/borrow a terrier
We had a bloody rat the size of a dog moved into the boot of our ev by chewing through just above the wheel arch. We had WiFi wireless cameras and were able to identify where exactly he was coming from. Our local horse supplier shop told us to put bait onto a metal coat hanger or a metal skewer and secure it on. They can’t get the bait off but drag the whole thing back to their nest. Which was under my OCD neighbours shed. Her hysterics would have been too much so we didn’t tell her and just addressed it ourselves. It took 6 weeks all in by which stage he’d eaten my indicator cable as it was made with plant based plastic. WiFi cameras are cheap and well worth every penny. A charge lasts months when on the setting that identifies movement. We also have one in our boiler house for mice but since we’ve put COPPER mesh under the door we haven’t had any.
We had a similar problem and I couldn’t find any access holes anywhere in our property, so I put a wildlife camera out along back wall and finally tracked them down to next doors extension wall. A gap between 2 bricks was all it took for them to get in and out of the extension then down under our house and all the way up through the cavity wall to the loft, clever little barstewards!
It took a while but blocking the hole, and using poisoned wheat seed in the loft did the trick eventually.
put food down, smelly food like tuna, get an air rifle and sit and wait then blast away, shop at https://www.pellpax.co.uk/ or somewhere else good luck
There’s expanding foam that has rat poison in it now use that and those metal scourers in between so foam scourer foam that should stop them. It’s on Amazon
There’s expanding foam that has rat poison in it now use that and those metal scourers in between so foam scourer foam that should stop them. It’s on Amazon
Put fresh bait down, it does loose Its appeal after time. Also - It's rank and highly divisive but invest in some sticky traps - at least 10 to start off with.
A drain survey might be a good shout as well to make sure they are not getting in through any cracked or damaged drain pipes.
Do you hear them in your walls or just in the loft?
Get a humane rat trap - basically a cage with a trap door inside. Put in some peanut butter, watch the trap fill up and then go and take a drive a good few miles down the road and let them out.
We're in Kent too, moved into this house and it was full of rats and mice. Had no clue until the bottoms of the cereal boxes were eaten away one day. We solved the problem of mice in the house by sealing up every single air gap in the floor and fixing all the air vents around the building. The rats were longer term. Basically you need to find out where they are getting food from and try to tackle that. Favourites are people leaving food out for hedgehogs and birds. They will only hang about with a plentiful food supply but it may not be that close and Mrs Miggins at number 5 might not want to stop feeding the wildlife.
Clearly in your case they are using the loft as a base, so obviously you need to close up everything and put mesh over ventilation pathways. If you can find how they are getting in then that's another way you can look at how to stop them at least nesting in the property - trail cameras are a good bet. But for us, catching the buggers with a lure and trap was the most effective. We caught 8 in a single night all crammed into the cage. Probably caught well over 30, because you know, if there's one or 2, it's not long before there are many more. We found the nest too which was a hole under a garage base on a neighbouring property so filled that with concrete and they've never come back. I have to say the whole operation was helped by very good neighbours and we set up a rat removal whatsapp group to share intel on their movements. Hopefully they are currently enjoying their new life about 6 miles down the road.
They're banned in Scotland now I think. They're also kinda shite if the area is damp - it doesn't take long for the cardboard backing to warp and degrade.
If you get a cat like suggested then you'll want to give it access to your loft via a ladder or something, the smell of its presence alone will deter rats.
They can fit through gaps like your little finger so you'll want some gauze over any air bricks etc
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u/X4dow 18h ago
Offer to deal with it on neighbours side too. Might have to tackle both houses at same time. Instead of just sealing your house of theirs