How Can You Get Mice Out of a House in Ely?

It is the first advice everybody gives and it is good advice. It is worth being precise about what it achieves, because people try it, see partial results and lose confidence in the whole approach.

What Removing the Food Actually Does

• Makes the property much less worth visiting, which matters enormously for prevention
• Makes a treatment work better, because bait is no longer competing with an open bag of cereal
• Reduces how far they range indoors, which concentrates activity and makes it easier to find
• Stops the contamination getting worse in your food storage
• Sometimes ends a marginal problem entirely, where the property was being visited rather than lived in

What It Does Not Do

It does not remove an established population from a building. Mice already living in a structure will range further, work harder and find alternatives rather than leaving — and a house contains a great many things that are food to a mouse but do not look like food to you.

• Crumbs under and behind units and appliances
• Pet food, bird seed and animal feed, including in a garage
• Compost, food waste caddies and bins
• Fat and residue behind and beneath a cooker
• Soap, candles, glue, paper and card, all of which mice will use
• Anything stored in a shed, garage or loft that nobody has looked in for a year
• A neighbouring property, in a terrace or a block

Doing It Properly, Since It Is Worth Doing

1. Dry goods into sealed hard containers. Not the bags they came in, and not clip-boxes with a gap at the corner. Cardboard, paper and thin plastic are not barriers.
2. Pet food and bird seed the same, including in an outbuilding. This is the one people forget.
3. Clean under and behind the units and appliances, which is where the supply actually is.
4. Bins closed, food caddies emptied, and nothing left out overnight.
5. Clear stored cardboard, which is both food and nesting material.
6. Wash up before bed rather than leaving it, for the duration at least.

And Then the Two Things That Finish It

Treatment, to deal with the animals that are already in the building; and proofing, to close the way in. BPCA put a mouse at a gap of 5mm — roughly the diameter of the eraser end of a pencil — which is why the gap is almost always smaller than people are looking for.

Food removal makes both of those work better and neither of them optional. Done alongside a treatment it is genuinely valuable; done instead of one it usually just moves the problem.