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Will White here with Nexus pest solutions, bringing you another edition of questions we’re asking him out in the field. And today’s question is, what are some of the ways mice are entering into our home? That’s a very good question. And the list is long, and it can be wide. But what I want to do is give you one of the top three areas that you as a homeowner can look at to find out how mice are entering your home. With number one being the foundation. So we start with number one, the foundation. So what do you do, you walk around the house, and the foundation is where the home sits on top of the break. And you want to look and see if there’s any cracks or openings. And if you have weep holes, you know, we poles are by design, to allow water to escape from the brick. Now if you go and caulk that shed, the bricks are not going to function as they was meant to. So if you’re going to do it yourself, you want to put something in there that will allow water to escape, but not allow mice and paths to enter. So the foundation is where I would start, these are things that you can do. Number two, the conduit lines, so conduit lines, utility lines, electrical lines, you know, from the electrical box, you want to check where the air conditioning conduit is entering the house, the water outlets are entering the house, you know, go around there and take a look. And keep this in mind. And that’s what all three of these, if you could fit a pencil in an area, then that’s big enough for a mouse to get into. So keep that in mind. So this whole does not have to be necessarily big because the pencil was not, you know, when you look at the width of a pistol, it’s not that it wouldn’t, it’s not that wide. So you want to keep that in mind as you’re doing the inspection, anything the size of a pencil or larger, it needs to be sealed. So back to it kinda allies air conditioning lines, the electrical boxes, you know, where they mount the electrical meter to the house, make sure to that sealed off your water outlets on on the house, make sure that they’re capped off and there’s no entry points, you know, leading into the home from behind those areas. And sometimes those utility wires that are connected to your house where they mount that what is like this small transformer on your house, you want to make sure that that thing is don’t touch it. But you know, make sure there’s no opening there. And if there is something you might need to talk to the utility company about coming out and repairing that, especially if you have in mice in the attic, you know, on the secondary level. So these are things that you can look for inspect as you’re walking around. Now number three, it’s going to sound obvious, but it’s so true. The doors so your garage door, your front door, your rear door, you know you want to make sure that the doors are sealed, you know your weather stripping on the bottom of the doors are sealed off, you know, we go to a lot of homes where you know, folks like to keep that main door open and a storm door closed, you know, let sun and let fresh air in. But there’s a gap at the bottom of the door where the stripping has come to weatherstrip and has come off or the door just does not fit flush with the stoop of the home. So you want to keep an eye out for that because that is like having a door open 24 hours a day for mice. Same thing with the garage, you want to check the weather stripping on the garage. You know one of the easiest ways to do it, you can look at it from the outside, because sometimes what you see on the outside can be different than what’s being seen on the inside. So you want to take a look at the outside close the door look outside make sure that the weather stripping alone the sides of the door and underneath the door is flush with the ground, everything is touching that device have not already chewed out the weather stripping on the side of the door. Then go inside the garage, let the garage door down, cut the lights off and see if you see any daylight anywhere around. And if you do see daylight these are areas that’s going to need to be if they can be sealed, sealed or repaired. Now, those are my top three things a homeowner can do to look for mice. But listen here. If it’s something that you would like our assistance with a feel free to give our office a call at 414-355-3732. And as always, you can ask for me, I’m Will White. I’ll be more than happy to assist you any way I can. But until next time, I want to thank you for listening to this podcast and I hope you have a pest free day
