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Motion sensing mouse trap

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Stumped

Apr 19, 2017
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I have a mouse in my house and I can not catch it. It will eat cheese off of the floor but it will not go into traps. I looked on youtube for some ideas and the one that I think will work is one based on a motion sensor. The idea is to suspend a translucent box above some grated cheese and when the mouse goes to eat the cheese, a motion sensor will be activated and fire a solenoid which would release the box on top of the mouse thereby trapping it. I know nothing about electronics but I did find a diagram online.

If someone could identify what the various components in this image are or even create a purchase list for me, that would be greatly appreciated. You could even modify the schematic if you think it is necessary.

Within the image, I added numbers next to the various components to help identify each item in your response.

Thanks so much ... Michael
 

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Audioguru

Sep 24, 2016
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Maybe the mouse will hear the solenoid and run away before the box has fallen.
Then you trap the mouse in the box. When you lift the box to grab the mouse it runs outta there and is back in your house.
 

73's de Edd

Aug 21, 2015
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My version had the meece tripping by passing thru separated laser diode( run at low power) and its separated sensor.
The front entry door was . . .guillotine style . . .vertically mounted aluminum sheet in 2 grooves and held up with cotton twine, but that twine passed thru a loop of nichrome wire which the relay fed power from 2 D cells when the relay activated. A series elect capacitor timed out the relay after ~2-3 mins heating..
The only noise made was the whish of the door falling down.
Gridwork top covering let a forked stick thru to manipulate and hold the mouse down to be able to lift the box and then grab with a multi folded towel.( Two person operation)
Zero failure rate.
 

hevans1944

Hop - AC8NS
Jun 21, 2012
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My wife discovered that putting a small quantity of used cooking oil, about a quarter-cup, in a small jar with a screw-on lid and setting it out for the mice to investigate worked really well. The mouse gets their front paws wet, falls into the jar, and can't get out. Sounds absurd, but try it. Used cooking oil is better than fresh, but try both.

An empty peanut butter jar is about the right size for your average rodent. In the morning, inspect the jar (or jars) and apply the screw-on lid to any jar containing a mouse. Dispose of jar containing mouse in weekly household trash.
 

JereBrown

Jun 23, 2017
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I really appreciate you work Stumped. But don't you think that hiring the pest control service is much better as it assures no arrivals of pests and rodents in future too. My friend has recently hired a team to control the rodents in her home and got all the rodents exterminated very easily. Seeking the professionals help is always a better option.
 
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ChosunOne

Jun 20, 2010
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I personally avoid professional exterminators if I can. Their methods, in my humble opinion, are suited to a business model rather than efficiency. In practice, they tend to be experts in the use of poisons that won't kill their customers and/or pets fast enough to be unequivocally linked to the company.
In my humble opinion.

Michael, mice aren't that hard to trap. They're actually pretty easy, but it helps to know a few things: One, most mice live all their lives within a radius of about 9 feet from their nests---and they routinely examine everything within that nine-foot radius on a regular basis. They're extremely curious. Also--very important--they DON'T LIKE cheese. That urban myth was spread far and wide by cartoons so "everybody knows it", but it ain't true. They will eat cheese if it's the only food available, but they don't particularly like it. They DO like peanut butter, and the PB smell is more pervasive. You were using the wrong bait.

Fancy traps are superfluous--the old vintage snap-traps work just fine, but if you place them where it's convenient to you instead of the 9-foot circle of their turf, you might miss them. Put the traps where you find their droppings. And use peanut butter. Or use Hevan1944's trap.

In response to the OP, motion sensors aren't well suited to traps. They're area coverage sensors, designed to trip when something moves within an area, not when something reaches a specific spot within the area. You can narrow it down to that spot by "cross-zoning" so two independent sensors have intersecting coverage that overlap only on one spot, but that can be tricky, and that's also when you begin to discover that motion sensing isn't as simple as most people think. It's easy to detect motion--much harder to detect only motion of only the thing you're after, in a world of random traffic that we usually don't notice. E.g. a housefly landing on the receptor of a sensor can look as big as a mouse 5 feet away. (I.e., can have the same effect.)

I'd personally have another shot at trapping it with better bait. And keep all crumbs and food scraps cleaned up so it's forced to forage at your traps.
 

Externet

Aug 24, 2009
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On the floor, sticky glue sheets with bacon at its center works.
 

hevans1944

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I found a Victor electronic mouse trap, complete with partially decomposed mouse, in my backyard last year. We lived near some apartments, so I suspect the owner of the trap just tossed it out the door after the trap had done its job. These things cost about twenty bux and are said to kill up to one hundred mice with one set of four AA-size dry-cells for power. So tossing it, just because it contained a dead mouse, doesn't seem like an economical solution to me. I would bait the trap daily and dispose of any dead rodents found inside. Problem should be cleared up in about a week to ten days or so. Here is a Google results page with links to other electric mouse traps.

I think I would build my own electric mouse trap, using a 15,000 V AC neon sign transformer I just happen to have laying around the house after forty-something years. Wife wants to use it to burn random arc traces in wet wood for the artistic effect, but I think it would also cook rodents just fine. Last time I fired it up was for Halloween, using it to create a noisy Jacob's Ladder: Brzhht! Brzhht! Brzhht! Love the sound of that.:D
 
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