Rodent service
Rodent Proofing in Charleston, SC
Closing every opening a rodent can use, in material it cannot chew through. This is the part that ends the problem rather than managing it.
What gets sealed, and with what
Our lifetime-warranted rodent-proofing products: galvanized steel mesh, sheet metal, hardware cloth and mortar. Not expanding foam, not caulk, and not steel wool pushed into a hole, all three of which a rat removes at its leisure and none of which survive a Lowcountry summer.
The working threshold is a quarter of an inch. Anything larger than that gets closed, because that is the gap that excludes both rats and mice, and gaps are almost always bigger than they look from the ground.
On a house here that means the crawl space first: vents re-screened in steel rather than the aluminum insect screen they came with, access doors made to seal again, failed skirting closed along the pier line, and every point where plumbing, ducting or wiring passes up through the floor system packed and collared. Then the roofline, the soffit and gable vents, the eaves, and any place a tree has been giving something a way onto the roof.
Why the crawl space is where this starts in Charleston
Houses here sit up on crawl spaces because of the water table and the flood risk, which means the underside of your floor is an accessible, sheltered, ventilated space that almost nobody enters. That is a good place to be a rat.
It is also why proofing and the crawl space work overlap so often. A crawl space that is damp enough to ruin its own insulation is a crawl space worth living in, so encapsulation and exclusion frequently end up quoted as one job. Sealing a crawl space properly closes most of the entry points as a side effect of closing the envelope.
Older downtown housing adds its own version of the same problem: settled masonry, original floor framing and a century of utility runs cut through it, each one a hole that was never meant to be permanent.
What it is not
It is not a bait station, it is not a quarterly visit, and it is not a treatment. Nothing about exclusion needs renewing, because a sealed vent stays sealed.
That is also why the guarantee can be written against it. We are not promising that no rat will ever approach your house. We are saying the openings are closed, and if something gets back in through work we did, we come back.
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Straight answers
- Free Phone Estimate, written price before work starts
- No poison, trapping and the Rat Vac system
- 100% money-back guarantee
- Family owned since 1982
Related
The rest of the work
Rodent Control
The whole rodent job in one place: finding how rats or mice are getting in, closing it, taking out what is already inside and cleaning up after. Four parts, one repair.
Read more →Rat Removal
Closing the route the rats used first, then getting the ones already inside out of the building, without poison. Removal on its own is a pause; sealing plus removal is the end of it.
Read more →Crawl Space Encapsulation
Sealing the crawl space off from the ground and the outside air. In a climate this humid it is the repair that stops the mold, the sagging floors and the rodents at the same time.
Read more →Crawl Space Remediation
Clearing out what a wet crawl space has already done: fallen insulation, rot, standing water and contamination. This is the cleanup that has to happen before anything gets sealed.
Read more →Vapor Barrier Installation
A sealed liner over the crawl space floor. Bare soil in the Lowcountry gives off moisture continuously, and that moisture has nowhere to go but up into your house.
Read more →Mold Remediation
Removing the growth, and then removing the reason it grew. Mold is a symptom of a water problem, so cleaning it without fixing the moisture just resets the clock.
Read more →Insulation Replacement
Wet insulation does not insulate, and rodent-fouled insulation is a contamination problem. Both come out, and both get replaced once the cause is fixed.
Read more →Infestation Sanitization & Remediation
What an infestation leaves behind is its own job. Droppings, nesting material and soaked insulation come out, and the space is disinfected rather than just cleared.
Read more →Vehicle Rodent Removal
Rats and mice nest in engine compartments, chew wiring and leave droppings and odor behind. A four-step process to clean it up, treat the vulnerable parts and discourage the next one.
Read more →We handle rodent proofing across the Charleston Lowcountry, see every area we serve, or start from rodent control in Charleston.
FAQ
Rodent Proofing: common questions
Can I not just foam the holes myself?
You can, and rats chew straight through it. Expanding foam and caulk are air seals, not rodent barriers, and steel wool packed into a gap comes out with a bit of persistence. The materials that work are the ones a rodent cannot get its teeth into: galvanized mesh, sheet metal, hardware cloth and mortar.
How small a gap actually matters?
A quarter of an inch. A mouse needs about that, and a young rat is not far behind, which is why the standard we work to seals anything larger rather than only the openings that look like a problem.
Do you seal the house before or after trapping?
Before. The entry points are sealed first so nothing new gets in, and then we trap and monitor what remains inside until the space is confirmed clear. Trapping an open house means catching rats while more keep arriving.
Does this help with anything besides rodents?
Usually, as a side effect. The same openings that let a rat into a crawl space let in humid outside air, and in this climate that air is what feeds the mold and ruins the insulation. Closing the envelope is doing two jobs at once, which is why we so often quote it alongside the crawl space work.
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