Rat Control in Phoenix, AZ

The roof rat comes in high

The roof rat is a climber. In the older Phoenix neighborhoods with mature citrus, palms and oleander hedges, it has everything it needs: fruit on the trees, cover in the fronds and the hedges, water from the irrigation, and block walls and branches to run along to the roof.

So it comes in high. The usual ways in are the open ends under the first row of roof tile, a roof or gable vent with a torn screen, the gap where a patio cover meets the house, and the line set where the air conditioning comes through the wall. A rat problem here is very often an attic problem.

The pack rat on the desert edge

Where the houses back onto washes and open desert, the other rat is the pack rat, or woodrat. It builds a nest of sticks, cactus pieces and whatever else it can carry, in a sheltered spot nobody disturbs - under a shed, in a garage, inside a block wall, or on top of an engine.

It is a different animal with different habits, but the fix runs the same way: find where it is getting in, close it, and take out what is there.

Why we do not use poison

Anticoagulant bait does kill rats. The problem is where. A poisoned rat dies inside the structure - a wall cavity, an attic, the space under a tile roof - and there is no way to reach it. What follows is a smell that lasts for weeks, and in a Phoenix summer it does not take long to arrive.

We trap instead, using traps and the Rat Vac system, so everything that comes out of the building is accounted for.

How the work runs

The entry points are mapped first, then sealed in steel and mortar before the trapping starts, so nothing new gets in while we work. Trapping then runs over several days rather than one visit, because rats avoid a new object in a familiar space until it stops being new.

Then the affected areas get cleaned: droppings, nesting material and contaminated insulation out, the space sanitized, insulation replaced where it needs to be.