Rat Control in Fort Lauderdale, FL

The roof rat comes in high

The roof rat is a climber, and South Florida suits it. Palms give it cover and a nest off the ground, mango, avocado and citrus trees give it food, and fences, branches and overhead lines give it a road to the roof.

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

The Norway rat along the water

Broward County is cut through with canals, lakes and seawalls, and the Norway rat lives along them. It burrows into banks, under slabs and sheds and beside seawalls, and it comes into a house low: under a garage door, through a gap around a pipe, or along the plumbing.

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 South Florida heat 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.