Rat Control in Salt Lake City, UT

The rat in this valley lives low

The rat we deal with here is mostly the Norway rat. It burrows, it likes water, and it lives low - along the Jordan River, in the banks of the irrigation canals and creeks, and in storm and sewer lines. It comes into a house from underneath: through a gap at the foundation, a basement window, a window well, a garage, or up through a damaged drain line.

So the houses nearest the river and the canals see the most rat calls, and a rat problem here is usually a basement-and-foundation problem rather than an attic one. It also means a rat inside a cracked drain line is in the structure without crossing anything an exterior inspection would look at, which is why we check the plumbing when the evidence points that way.

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, a basement ceiling, the insulation above a garage - and there is no way to reach it. What follows is a smell that lasts for weeks, and none of it has done anything about the opening the rat used.

In a house that is closed up and heated from October to April, that smell stays in with you. 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.