Poor Ratatouille
I’ve had mice getting into my car recently, none have died yet that I’m aware of but now this pic has me concerned. Supposedly mice hate the smell of peppermint oil so I’ve started using that to dissuade them from trying to build new nests. There’s nothing edible in the car so I think they are just looking for a cozy place.
My neighbor recently found one in the engine bay of his brand new car, which had been brained by the radiator fan. No wires chewed… yet.
He swears that the peppermint oil strategy is working since then.
Rodents will chew wires just for the sake of chewing on something. Ask anyone who stores project vehicles for any length of time. I also had a rat or a squirrel or something chew up and spit out all my spark plug wires several years ago. It’s a good idea to keep the little blighters out of your stuff.
I hope you have better luck with peppermint oil than we did when we had mice in our house. It didn’t seem to do a thing, unfortunately.
Thankfully, a few live trappings and releases took care of the problem.
We also set up some live traps with food in them in the garage and house, and had a pro clean out our crawlspace and seal it up better, and theres now some murder traps down there for anything that does get in. I also set up a few ultrasonic pest repellers around the house but I’m skeptical about how well they work.
rodents ate my wife’s car’s fuel line because they can smell the fish oils used in the construction
Thanks for the tip! I’m dealing with mice in an old stone shed at the moment - it would be nice not to be killing them, and I do like the smell of peppermint.
All wires are edible.
Awww
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If your car was anywhere in the northeast USA last summer, you should change all your air filters anyway. Remember when the sky turned orange? That wildfire smoke ended up in your filters as well.
Or if you are in the western US from April to October.
The best part was when you checked the AQI, didn’t know what the number meant so you checked Google for a breakdown, and your current AQI number was more than four times the highest number on any chart you could find.
I have HEPA filters on the house’s air intake and charged then twice during The Smoke, and once after; all three times they were heavily clogged.
I also had massive, massive headaches and eventually had to buy one of those indoor air filterer machines. I’d always kinda thought of them as a scam, but I turned it on and the sensor alerted right away and the machine kicked on. Ran for like an hour before it turned itself off again, and my headaches cleared up afterward. It’s a nice little machine.
So Micah Bell died in an air filter.
Awwww…. Poor little thing. I hope it was painless.
I can’t even tell what the hell it is.
Rat
Normally a bad smell won’t hurt.
I hate to be this guy but… Most things don’t die painlessly…
Cars have cabin air filters? When did this start?
Not all of them
It’s been going on a long time. My '97 Honda has cabin air filters.
Reminds me of when it was smelly as hell in our house a few years ago and when we checked just by chance the roller shutter of one of the windows, we found a dead bird in there which probably got stuck there and was crushed to death.
My parents had a rat decomposing in a glue trap for weeks and were complaining about the smell because they forgot there was a glue trap in the room where the rat was killed.
Please don’t use glue traps, by the way. They’re incredibly cruel.
It’s a distinctive smell. It goes away after a while.
Die stinken höchstens 2 oder 3 Tage, da ist ja nicht viel dran.
Depends. I’ve had a dead mouse smell for two months before it stopped.
Even since then, I’ve noticed it in other places. Like I was in a fancy restaurant one time and they had a covered patio where I recognised the smell. Totally ruined my meal.
Ah yes, sorry I should have provided context but thought German readers would recognize it and other would ignore it.
This was a German reddit meme where a guy had mice in his apartment in Berlin. An exterminator just poisoned a lot of them and told him the smell would be gone in 2 or 3 days.
He was describing the smell in very colorful words.
“Da ist nicht viel dran” trended on r/de for a year or so.
Good thing is that the smell does fully go away even if you don’t get to it. My house had a problem with mice in the attic and walls, but there was no patching fix that could reasonably done, since this is an old and pretty drafty house. They can really slip through the smallest cracks, even underground, and there had to be a hundred of cracks like that. Putting up and swapping snap traps was a pretty onerous task that never seemed to fully work.
The pest control crew that did fix the problem did so by putting a bunch of slow-acting poison bait traps around the property and in the attic. 3 days later some seriously awful smells popped up throughout the house, but they went away after a little over a week. Those mice are part of the building now, but I’ve completely forgotten about them.
