For obvious reasons, we talked to Dr. Bobby Corrigan about the issues that doors present when not properly protected from rodent access. He had some great insight about rodents and doors in both commercial and residential settings.
“Doors of all of all types are famous for letting in rodents,” says Dr. Corrigan. “You have typical front doors of homes, or you have the main door of a restaurant or anything like that. Often times, we don’t seal them correctly at the bottom, we leave that seal or gap because we don’t appreciate it when you’re standing up and you’re like 5’8” looking down a small gap of 6 mm you almost don’t see it. So, it’s the unseen open door of a closed door. It’s an open door for rodents.
“Doors of course come in different shapes and sizes we’ll have double doors in commercial accounts and in office buildings and hotels and even if we correctly seal them, we don’t often seal between the doors, that thing called the astragal gap. We get an ‘F’ in terms of school grades on how well we keep our doors sealed. And because of that rodents come in sometimes just at will. I don’t have any data to prove it, but it may be the number one type of gap for them.”
Tips for PMPS?
Dr. Corrigan has a few tips he always shares with PMPs that focus on rodent control services.
“For the PMPs they have to if they’re a reputable company proceed down the path of Integrated Pest Management (IPM),” he says. “And the reason IPM is the kindergarten level of pest control is because it combines all the good things. First you inspect to see, can you build them out? So, you’re doing inspections so that you can see are all the doors correctly sealed, do they have something as a pest excluder device. Check the all the doors, check the holes, check the penetrations. I always advise them if they’re not sealed you should offer to seal them. Do it for them, it’s a great service. So that’s the first thing, keeping them out.
“And then, after that – and this is the hard lesson, you try to advise customers, please don’t attract them with dog food and food and garbage. So, the second (tip) is trying to get the customer to be a partner and not attracting rodents.”
Two more tips are truly important, as well, Dr. Corrigan added.
“Third is what non-chemical tools are they going to use to control. Are they going to use snap traps for example for house mice or use multiple catch traps. Glue traps? What’s their non-chemical approach.
“The last one, which should be last and not first, are you going to use some poisonous bait of some sort to kill them because that’s the least desirable and least effective for the long term. The most effective is keeping them out of the building in the first place. Like I said I’m a fanatic about that. Why charge them every month and put more poison out every month to kill them when you can try to keep them out from the very first week. That’s the way it should be.”
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As the leading manufacturer of door sweep solutions, Burrtec is providing quality exclusion products to PMPs and building material suppliers. It is the North American division of Burrtec Co., Ltd., one of Japan’s largest pest control producers. To learn more about Burrtec, visit our U.S. website.