Roof Rat Removal: Outsmarting This Wily Rodent with Remote Monitoring

Roof rats (rattus rattus) have proven to be one of the most challenging and dangerous rodents in the U.S. today. Once confined largely to the South, roof rat populations have steadily spread to the Southwest and West, and are now starting to take root in the middle of the country.

Carriers of multiple diseases, roof rats are a public health hazard. They cause considerable damage in the food value chain, from agriculture to food processors to food service facilities, and are a nuisance to businesses and homeowners.

The climbing and acrobatics skills of the roof rat make it much more formidable than other rodents. The roof rat’s ability to scale walls, walk on wires, and get pretty much anywhere makes it harder to trap. Traps on the ground will be unlikely to significantly reduce a roof rat population.

To effectively eradicate a roof rat infestation, you’ll need to place traps at some of the most hard-to-reach places in a structure: on pipes, rafters and columns, above drop ceilings, and in trees and attics. Monitoring all of the traps manually demands significant physical effort and creates a risk of injury to those that have to reach the traps.

But you don’t need to check all traps if you’re using Trapmate. Our networked Hub and Sensors remote monitoring systems alert you with absolute certainty whether or not there’s a kill in your trap. You’ll only climb into the attic or into the drop ceiling when you need to clear the trap.

And you’ll know exactly where and when the rats are being trapped, providing critical intelligence for your exclusion efforts. The time Trapmate saves you, eliminating empty trap checks, will free you and your team up to focus on inspection, exclusion, cleanup and other critical tasks. As importantly, you’ll reduce the physical strain and risk of injury for your staff.

Trapmate’s unique attributes make it the ideal monitoring system for defeating roof rats.

Trapmate sensors are small in size and securely attach to the most common rat traps. You can deploy Trapmate-equipped traps anywhere roof rats might travel, something you can’t do with the bulky devices of other remote monitoring systems. You’llbe able to use your existing traps, saving you a lot of money.

Equipped with a reed switch –a magnet sensor — Trapmate sensors provide virtually 100% accurac

when recording a kill, eliminating the false positives that are time wasters for PCOs.

Trapmate’s battery-powered Hubs can be mounted anywhere. You can place them on trees, on roofs, onrafters — really, anywhere since you don’t need to plug them in — safely out of sight and out of reach.

There’s no pairing or passwords require to set up Trapmate sensors. And you can check trap status from anywhere, unlike Bluetooth-based systems which require you to be on site.

In addition to enabling long-term monitoring of locations with a typical degree of rat pressure, Trapmate can be used for rapid eradication of roof rats and other pests in heavily infested areas. Our low cost of deployment and operational costs enable PCOs to quickly knock down populations with extensive trap deployments, eliminating or reducing the use of rodenticides.

In a recent deployment with over 500 sensor and trap deployments the PCO was able to eliminate over 200 roof rats in a single 2 week period.

The PCO equipped their existing traps with Trapmate Vibration/Magnet Sensors and mounted them (as shown in the pictures) under drop ceilings, on pipes, and along other conduits.

Trapmate’s agnostic approach to trapping methods and equipment design permits PCOs to operate using their preferred methods and equipment. This flexibility also facilitates rotational strategies to deal with trap shyness, and allows PCOs to dynamically react to different circumstances at different locations for a wide range of customers.

Want more information on how you can use Trapmate to defeat roof rats for you and your clients? E-mail [email protected], call (800) 760-3966 or use this form. If you’ve been a user of ActiveSense monitoring systems, ask about our ActiveSense replacement program