I want to make a rat zapper because they keep getting into the bird feed dish. You can’t shoot them because they are too fast and scatter when you open the door.

I made a grid (12 interleeved fingers) of brass on a piece of wood and connect it up to the outdoor light socket with a breaker. Then I just need to turn on the light from inside to zap them when they are in the dish. But BION, 120 volts doesnt do it. They just “fly” out of the dish and run. And that’s just cruel.

I want to use one of my 16 volt/16 amp transformers in reverse to produce ~900 volts. I am wondering whether I can do this directly (with a breaker), or if I should put a light bulb in series with the transformer input (formarly the output) to limit the current. A 60 watt bulb would pass no more than 0.5 amp (60 watts/120 volts = 0.5 amp) to the transformer and stepped up 7.5 times, this would be no more than about 67 milliamps. I’m wondering if this would be enough current and if the bulb is even necessary.

Why not get one of these

Would also take out the birds and defeat the purpose.

I have the same problem with squirrels, but I have yet seen one outrun a pellet from a rifle…(http://www.largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-wink.gif)

Squirrels are not Rats. When Squirrels hear a noise they lift their head to see what made it. When Rats hear a noise, they just put their heads down and scamper! Get a night vision scope on a pellet rifle and use that. Don’t turn the light on, have a window cracked just enough to cover the dish, then when the devils come and start eating just shoot! Although, I’ve heard that some vermin can sense, or even see, the light from night vision equipment.

Hard to tell from this if rats can much sense light in the IR spectrum or not;

By studying rats’ eyes and behavior, scientists have a pretty good idea of how a rat sees the world. In a nutshell, rats are dichromats: they perceive colors rather like a human with red-green colorblindness, but their color saturation may be quite faint, and color appears to be far less important to them than brightness. Rat vision is quite blurry, around 20/600 for normally pigmented rats. Albino rats, however, are probably blind or severely visually impaired, with about 20/1200 vision.

http://www.ratbehavior.org/RatVision.htm

Not as much fun as building; and somebody else has done the engineering (http://www.largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-frown.gif), but maybe these can at least provide some inspiration. Or just at least a ready made solution.

Not sure what your state laws are. but we are out in the country and use OneBit 3 blocks in a pack for about 6 bucks… Usually find it at feed stores.

Just keep it away from cats and doggies. Rats will nibble on it and go for the water to die.
Don’t need much of a chunk to tie or set on someplace off the ground. Chicken will eat anything on the ground. Birds don’t go to it.

We are by Rice fields and we find sometime in a Vac. lot next door, we sometime find about 20 of them dead in a few days. Guess that is call a rat pack… lol.

Bruce Chandler said:

Not as much fun as building; and somebody else has done the engineering (http://www.largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-frown.gif), but maybe these can at least provide some inspiration. Or just at least a ready made solution.

Whoa Bruce. $99.98 and they’ll throw in a third one !! I’ll stick with the good old Victor traps. Years ago, my sister-in-law was using glue traps because she said the Victor spring loaded traps were in-humane. Really ??? I said to her, So you would rather see a mouse struggle in the glue, chewing it’s legs off or dying a slow death ?

The problem with a dedicated trap like those zappers is that the vermin are smarter than that. They see one go in and not come out and become leary.

When I would do spring traps, I would bait them with peanut butter but not set the trap. Once they get used to the free meal, set them and snap.

If you can selectively zap them right in the food dish and they see the birds aren’t getting zapped or they only sometimes get zapped (when I happen to see one), that’s quite different and more like the peanut butter scenario.

And this doesn’t cost anything to make as I have everything already.

Ya but it’s not as fun as seeing them fly though the air and do back flips after they get hit by a pellet.

While I think trying to electrocute them is cruel I’ll offer this. You don’t need more voltage, you need more current. Your house voltage should have been able to deliver the current need to do the job. The problem is probably the proximity of the two electrodes. Too close together and they will just cause a shock and make them jump away. What you want is one electrode to contact the front legs or mouth and the other to contact the rear legs with enough positive contact to pass current.

Around here squirrels regularly get across two primaries on the power poles. They usually explode! Power company has installed auto resetting breakers to keep them from shutting down circuits.

Explode? Gee, that didn’t happen when my dog, Midget, had one cornered up a pole. The squirrel got tired of waiting for Midget to leave, so it tried to tightrope walk the top wire (neutral wire). Partway along it lost its balance, and its tail wiped around and contacted the next wire down. There was a flash and a bang, and that squirrel must flew a good 12 feet into the nearest tree. Its a good thing none of speak squirrel, because that thing sat in the tree cussing for the next 5 minutes or so.

Well I put the high voltage source together and was testing it out. First I connected it to the A/C, ~18 volt tap of my MRC 6200. Sure enough, I had about 127 volts coming out of it. And, it was pulling about 1.5 amps without any load on it.

I put a 60 watt light bulb as a load and it glowed nice and bright. The MRC was now putting out 4 amps.

Next on to wall outlet testing. With the 60 watt bulb now in series with the transformer “primary” (wired backwards as a step-up), I was getting about 67 volts at the output. That won’t cook anything.

Figuring the light bulb was adding too much resistance, I removed the bulb and using a 22 gauge alligator clip jumper, jumped the bulb’s socket.

I plugged it in and the jumper instantly went up in a blaze of glory filling the house with the dreaded electronic smoke smell! This was with no load and I never did see the output voltage before yanking the plug.

I decided if it pulls this much current with no load, I don’t even want to try it with a load on it. I put the bulb back in series and the output was again 67 volts, so I guess only the jumper fried before I pulled the cord.

So the secondary on the transformer wasn’t designed to be the primary. It has too low of a resistance/impedance and the jumper acted a fuse. I wonder how darn many amps it was pulling to do that.

I am not sure what is funnier to me as I have laughed my way through this thread. The part where Todd turned normal rats into flying rats with applied stimulation, or that he is testing this contraption in the house. OK now I have no real understanding of electricity but as I understand it volts isn’t what kills but its amps. So are you trying to increase the voltage when instead you should be trying to increase the amperage. I know a car automobile coil will knock your male parts stiff but wont kill you and its like 400 volts. But I have heard of people getting fried with low voltage high amps. Isn’t this the principle that a hot wire fence employs? Like I said I am just throwing this out there I really don’t now.

What about explosives?

I think that if this is going to work, I need to put a metal pan right under the feeder and connect it to one of the so the leads so that if they are standing in the pan and contact the other lead of the gridwork in the seed dish, the current goes through them.

I actually had a pan of water in their path with the hope that they get their feet wet on the way.

Yes, it’s the amps that kill, but you need the voltage to push those amps though the resistance of the fur, muscle, etc. to get it to shock the heart or fry the nervious system. Also, I know of someone’s rabbits who continually chew through power cords…, and come back for more. (Some cheap thrill I guess.)

IIRC, 250 milliamps though your heart will kill you…, with enough voltage to push it.

Devon Sinsley said:

I am not sure what is funnier to me as I have laughed my way through this thread. The part where Todd turned normal rats into flying rats with applied stimulation, or that he is testing this contraption in the house. OK now I have no real understanding of electricity but as I understand it volts isn’t what kills but its amps. So are you trying to increase the voltage when instead you should be trying to increase the amperage. I know a car automobile coil will knock your male parts stiff but wont kill you and its like 400 volts. But I have heard of people getting fried with low voltage high amps. Isn’t this the principle that a hot wire fence employs? Like I said I am just throwing this out there I really don’t now.

What about explosives?

If by hot wire fence you mean ‘electric fence’ - my electric fence pulses about 4000 volts.

You will know if you touch it!

Tom

Tom Stephens said:

Devon Sinsley said:

If by hot wire fence you mean ‘electric fence’ - my electric fence pulses about 4000 volts.

You will know if you touch it!

Tom

Long ago our boss used to tell of when he was a kid and used to get the other kids to pee on the electric fence. Not something anyone would soon forget. (http://largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-yell.gif)

Just to see what would happen I put my finger on an electric fence once. I was maybe 10 at the time. It tingled, and my finger twitched side to side. It was rather odd. Then it started to burn, and then it hurt like heck.

I=E/R Or, current equals voltage divided by resistance. So you need enough voltage to get enough current through the resistance of the rat’s body. Now if only I had a rat handy, to measure it’s body resistance, we could figure out how much voltage we would need…