Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/02/19/this-electronic-ultrasonic-bug.html
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I’ve tried two versions of ultrasonic pest repellers for a mouse problem. The first didn’t work. A friend tried the Bell & Howell version and said it worked so I tried them. So far so good after over a year. No more mice.
Anecdotal but that is my own experience with these devices.
Buddy of mine did a research project on these ultrasonic pest repellent gizmos for a large research institution. The results were mixed. Most of them did nothing. A few attracted rodents. None repelled anything.
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I’m kind of unsurprised that a product badged with a zombie brand like Bell and Howell would be of sketchy quality. What’s next, Bell and Howell explosive sniffing dowsing rods?
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The Mice Consortium has B&H stock.
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Seems like the mice that used to live around here had some of that stock because they moved out, I assume to a better apartment.
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Two things here. Either you’re falling for the post hoc fallacy (A occurred, then B occurred. Therefore, A caused B.) Or the repeller works.
If the repeller works, how does it? What is its mechanism of action? Do we know, scientificially, that it’s (1) producing an ultrasonic sound, and (2) that rodents hear these sounds and react to them by staying away from them?
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All I know is I tried one brand of ultrasonic repellers and they didn’t work.
Then I tried another brand and the mice disappeared.
The only change in my house was the addition of the Bell & Howell ultrasonics.
As I wrote, it’s anecdotal but it’s what happened. Still no mice after a year or more.
On the bright side, the video shows you can save some money and get the off-brand one without compromising pest repellent properties.
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I will balance the anecdotal evidence here and say that the only thing that solved the mouse problem at our brewery was poison traps, and keeping things scrupulously clean. Ultrasonic devices did absolutely nothing.
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We have a basement that opens to the garage. So since the garage door isn’t tight on the bottom, we get mice in the basement during the winter. I set peanut-butter-baited traps for them.
We’ve had no mice in the basement this winter. And I had set no traps. Which means not setting traps scares away mice. This is anecdotal, too.
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On a related note, my infrasonic elephant repellent device has been 100% effective for years.
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They all fall for the sound in this tube
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The obvious question is: why is this not in the Boing Boing Store?
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I give it a week to feature it or some other brand.
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“Back in the day” when I walked into a store with a bunch of tube-type TV sets turned on I would have to turn around and leave quickly–the extremely high-pitched sound produced by the flyback transformers was actually painful to my ears. Modern sets don’t cause that problem.
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I have a plastic spoon that repels giraffes. It’s been 100% effective so far.
teknocholer Beat me to it!
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Totally anecdotal but our house had mice in attic (loft) not long after moving in so I bought ultrasonic dooda with the view that cheap enough to try.
‘Seemed’ to work, as others have said in that mice are gone but since loft now full of accumulated sh*t, even if this mechanism had any chance, all that stuff would be blocking it.
Anyhow, that was 22yrs ago, it’s still going, chirping away (or at least I hear it click) up there like a little soldier !
Ah, but it’s not what happened. Many things presumably happened in that time that you failed to mention (because you assumed they weren’t relevant). You grew older and hopefully wiser. Perhaps you learned how to tango, cooked some new dishes, learned that one weird trick to deal with hard water in your pipes…
Since we know, non-anecdotally, that these “repellers” don’t actually do anything, everything else you did (or stopped doing) was equally, if not more, relevant. (I’m betting it was the tango.)
They were offended by the sudden lack of hospitality. Why, there used to be free peanut butter!
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I’m holding out until the refurbished 2011 models are in stock.
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