Home built rat zapper

orezok · Jul 22, 2019

It has been a bad year for rats this year. I have an old fence charger that I have not used in years. When I last used it to protect my garden from rodents, I would regularly find a rabbit zapped to death.

I was thinking of taking a piece of 3 drain pipe and install one of the wires (hot and ground) into each side of the pipe so that the rat would contact it when it entered. I would put a small amount of bait in the center to attract them.

Your thoughts?

Mendonsy · Jul 22, 2019

It certainly would get their attention, but I doubt that it would kill them.

jmc · Jul 22, 2019

Seems reasonable, but a fried rat in each end would block access by their colleagues. And you'd have to empty it.

I had some grow lights in the basement of an old farmhouse and the mice kept eating my sprouts. Put the plants on a metal surface and suspended that surface over a sheet of tin such that the mice had to stand on the tin to reach up to the upper surface (with the plants on it). Had a lower voltage fence charger designed for pets and used it to put voltage between the two surfaces. It didn't kill them but we never lost any sprouts after that. You might scale that up if your tube trap...

Budweiser John · Jul 22, 2019

We have 13 neutered feral cats on our place and not a rodent to be found anywhere. Our local humane society has a spay/neuter program which is essentially a you catchem we defrock em bargain basement no frills, no guarantee program aimed at reducing the total number of unwanted kittens in the county.
Our CPA deducted the cost on our income tax under Farm expense and thus far the IRS Hasn't’ Complained.

B. John

CADplans · Jul 22, 2019

YouTube has a prolific number of zap trap videos,,
the main thing you will learn from the videos is that rats are WAY smarter than most unliked animals.

Mice are easy to zap,,, I think the high voltage of a fence charger will give off ozone,, easily detected by odor,,
I think a better choice is a less than 100 volt DC "trap" that uses capacitors,,

JMHO,,,

flyerdan · Jul 22, 2019

If you want a really whiz-bang zapper, those flash units out of disposable cameras can't be beat. For added whoomph, you can piggy back a few more of the battery sized 330 mfd caps. And since they run off a single AA, you can put 8 in series and run off a 12v wall wart.