I previously wrote a blog post about the automatic trap, a c02 powered, rat killing robot. This thing is a $200 rat trap, some refer to as the Ferrari of rat traps.

Well I had placed it out and the rats just ignored it. Additionally I had quite a bit of trouble getting it to work with the app, largely due to the scant documentation which left out some of the details about how the app and trap work together.

I have a rat problem in my yard. Within walking distance of my home, there is a school, a park, a trailer park, a large apartment complex, a green space that has a trail and fruit trees, and directly behind my house resides an elderly woman with a huge yard, lots of fruit trees, and chickens. I sometimes see the rats scurrying along my fence, and they will sometimes move into a shed that I have. I decided that persistent trapping is needed to reduce the rat population in my neighborhood.

I ended up trapping 19 rats between July and August. In October I thought the population had declined so I stopped setting traps in the yard and left only the automatic trap set up since it requires very little intervention.

Initially I had checked it a few times by peeking over a little fence in my yard which separates our backyard from the neighbor’s since our dogs love to fight through the fence. After finding no activity all through October I forgot about it.

Today, my power went out due to a transformer blowing on the pole a few houses down. I went outside to make sure nothing was on fire, and happened to walk back to that corner of the yard to check the utility pole. I noticed a rat sticking out of the trap, so I gloved up and went to empty the trap and noticed 3 rats in total.

The app is supposed to alert me to new strikes but I keep my Bluetooth off, and apparently it doesn’t reconnect when Bluetooth is turned on.

When the app updated, I saw that it recorded 2 additional kills. I did notice a cat left some remains for me on my patio on the same day as one of the earlier strikes, so I assume the first two rats who were missing, were scavenged by local critters.

The interval has still averaged out to 1 eat about every 5 days though some weeks have been busier, and others slower.

At this average rate I’ll eliminate about 70 rats per year, or 1050 over the course of 15 years. Rats produce 75 rats per female and for whatever reason about 8 out of 10 have been female. I estimate rough numbers I may prevent the birth tens of thousands of rats in my neighborhood.

Overall my opinion of the automatic trap has changed, I’m considering trying an Alibaba dupe, which is 1/4th the price and placing it on the opposite side of my property to see if I can increase the kill rate and reduce the population further.