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I have a rodent problem which traditional traps and various other measures have have not been able to solve. I want to try to electrify a metal cage which I have. I don't believe that is as simple as attaching the plus and negative of say a 6 or 9 V battery to the cage, or is it?

Would such a voltage be sufficient or overkill for the mice? Obviously I am looking for a quick clean kill.

Null
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Alan A
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    We don’t design killing machines. – Solar Mike Jul 10 '20 at 09:51
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    @SolarMike is that actually a site rule? – user253751 Jul 10 '20 at 09:53
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    more a matter of ethics, take this design, scale it up a bit, and suddenly you could kill the neighberhood cats, also the path this will walk you down will be potentially lethal to anything that comes near the cage, Every person has tried to redesign the mouse trap, look up existing designs to find the one that suits your issue, and use that, not ones that may kill you by accident. – Reroute Jul 10 '20 at 09:57
  • @user253751 well you can, up to you. – Solar Mike Jul 10 '20 at 09:59
  • Shall I just delete this question, I'm not a crazed psycho looking for ideas to scale up. I have rodent problem and I have a young family. I have spent week closing all entry points, I have no idea how the rodents are entering still. Have tried live humane traps but nothing to date has worked. Sure they are cute and and soft but I don't want my kids crawling around where mice defecate and urinate which they do without control at will. – Alan A Jul 10 '20 at 10:06
  • Trust me, the path your going down would be lethal to your kids, I don't actually care for the rodents end state, look into mouse trap designs, – Reroute Jul 10 '20 at 10:20
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    To answer your question 9 V would be harmless.It's enough to irritate slugs though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtdCBWeL4SQ. – Transistor Jul 10 '20 at 10:42
  • I recommend a cat. Kinder on the kids too, once they have learned not to pull its tail. –  Jul 10 '20 at 20:22

1 Answers1

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Such electric traps are commercially available, but they're rather more complicated than connecting a small battery to a cage. My brother had a problem with rats, bought one of these, and we fixed it when it stopped working, which is how I know what one solution is. I'll go into enough detail so that you can see the sort of thing that's involved.

To kill humanely, you need enough current and energy across the heart. This particular trap used a narrow diameter plastic tube to exclude larger mammals, with two electrodes on the floor. A 500 μF photo-flash capacitor was charged to about 320 V by a standard photo-flash inverter circuit, but the potential was not applied to the electrodes. Why this complication? I would hazard a guess that there would be sufficient of an electric field that the sensitive rat would sense that something was not right, and not go across to the second electrode. A small sense voltage (<1 V) was therefore placed across the electrodes, and a thyristor fired the cap into the circuit when a resistance across them was detected. Needless to say the protection circuitry needed for the sense amplifier was interesting.

You'd be wasting your time with any lower voltage, or a continuously applied higher voltage. I suggest you buy commercially.

Neil_UK
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