Rodent control in garages

At a glance

Service

Rodent control in garages

Area covered

Riga and the surrounding region

Price

From €40 — the figure quoted is the final price

Availability

24/7, weekends and nights included

Reply time

Within 5 minutes of the form being submitted

How to book

Through the enquiry form only

A garage is quiet, dark and often left unvisited for weeks. If garden seed, animal feed or cardboard boxes are stored there, rodents move in quickly.

Damage to the car

Mice nest in the engine bay and the air filter housing and gnaw wiring insulation. The repair often costs many times more than the treatment.

What to store differently

Keep seed, animal feed and food in metal or rigid plastic containers. Cardboard and textiles are nesting material.

Treatment in a garage

We place stations along the walls and behind shelving. If the garage connects to the house, we check the gaps around the connecting door at the same time.

Garage co-operatives: the neighbour's unit keeps your problem going

In Riga garage co-operatives the units stand side by side in a single row with a shared roof, shared walls and often a shared basement level too. Partitions are no obstacle to a rodent — it gnaws a hole through a timber partition in one night, and in a concrete row it travels along the roof structure or through the ground beside the foundations. If the unit next door has held old furniture, garden soil, potatoes or bird food for years, your clean garage is only part of a larger territory. In practice this means treating one unit gives a limited result. The most effective option is treating several neighbouring units at once, or the whole row together, by agreement with the neighbours or the co-operative board — the cost is shared, and the network of points covers the real territory rather than the width of one door.

Seasonal tyres and equipment as nesting material

A garage almost always holds exactly what a rodent needs. A set of tyres that stands untouched for six months forms four enclosed, dark voids — a nest inside a tyre is one of the most common finds in spring. Add to that bags of old clothes, seat covers, tents, sleeping bags, cardboard boxes, offcuts of insulation and garden furniture cushions. A mouse does not eat this material but shreds it into fine fibres and carries it to the nest, so the damage usually shows up as a chewed edge or a gnawed hole rather than a missing item. We recommend storing tyres upright on a rack or in bags, textiles in rigid, closing boxes rather than bags, and not accumulating cardboard at all. Every soft item taken out is one nesting site fewer.

An attached garage as a direct route into the living space

If the garage is connected to a house, it is not a separate site but an anteroom to the building. A rodent gets into the garage under the door threshold, then finds its way further along a cable duct, a heating pipe entry, a ventilation opening or a void in a timber frame wall, and ends up appearing in the kitchen or the boiler room. That is exactly why we always inspect an attached garage together with the house rather than on its own. Attention goes to the wall between the garage and the living space: the door seal, every pipe and cable entry, the bottom edge along floor level and built-in cupboards. Sealing this crossing point with hard materials matters more than any number of control points, because it cuts the route. Treating a private house with a garage costs €90–110.

A car that has stood a long time without moving

After winter, or after a couple of months without being driven, a car in a garage needs checking deliberately, not just visually from the outside. First, lift the bonnet and look at the places where heat builds up and there is cover: above the battery, along the air filter housing, on top of the engine under the plastic cover. A nest of wood shavings, paper and textile fibres builds up there within a few weeks. Second, check the cable insulation and hoses for gnaw marks; a fresh bite looks like a lighter, stripped band. Third, look at the cabin filter area, the boot recess under the spare wheel and the underside of the seats for droppings. If you find a nest, the material must be collected with gloves and by a damp method. After that it makes sense to deal with the garage, because the car is the consequence, not the cause.

Gaps under the door threshold and how to seal them

In most garages the entry point is one and the same — the gap under an up-and-over or side-hinged door. A mouse needs six to seven millimetres, a rat two centimetres, and in old concrete units the threshold is usually crumbled and uneven, so in places the gap reaches several centimetres. The solution is mechanical. The uneven threshold is levelled with cement mortar so that the seating is even across the full width. A durable rubber seal is then fitted to the bottom edge of the door so that it beds down along its whole length. A seal that stands up to a dog's bite is not the same as a seal that stands up to a rodent's teeth — soft foam and expanding foam are gnawed through within a week, so gaps have to be filled with hard materials. Ventilation openings, cable entries and cracks in the wall at floor level should be checked in the same way.

Winter as the busiest period in a garage

Rodents appearing in a garage almost always coincides with the first settled frosts in late October and November. The reason is simple: outdoors, cover and food disappear, while the garage is dry, the wind cannot get in and the soft materials are right there. If the garage is heated or attached to the house, the pull is stronger still. So the check and the threshold sealing are worth doing in September or early October, before the rodents are inside, rather than in January when the nest is already in the tyres. Treatment in winter also takes longer, because in the cold the activity is concentrated and the animals move about less. We work all year round and around the clock, including emergency callouts. Fill in the form and we will reply within 5 minutes; the minimum callout is €40.