I was thinking of something like a camera, plus motion detection software and something to discriminate between a mouse and e.g. me or a cat/dog, plus the circuitry of a xenon flash tube to generate a high voltage pulse.
Or a proximity detector (but then there's a bit of a problem in keeping the high voltage pulse from interfering with or destroying the detector).
The former seems better, in that you could record and find out what routes they preferred, then position the elctrocution grid in the best place.
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Deportation is not on my list of options. I'd need to rent a car or take a bus to get near to the Pentland hills some miles away, then do some elementary hillwalking. Not on. And they're town mice, not country mice. They'd be owl food in no time. And leaving them elsewhere in Edinburgh (which is not 'the wild', except in some parts on a Friday night) would be antisocial.
No, the more I think about it, the more I want to see them then kill them quickly, not slowly as with poison (if it worked). Preferably without having to watch the process, though I'm sure some might say that in such a situation I should be forced to.
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Windmill, TiltNot@NoneHome.com Use t m i l l
J.R.R. Tolkien:- @ S c o t s h o m e . c o m
All that is gold does not glister / Not all who wander are lost
Poisoning should always be an absolute last resort anyway because unlike traps which kill the mouse where you can clean them up, poisoned mice go home to their nest under your floor/in your walls/etc and slowly rot.
Actually the last resort would be to nuke the house from orbit etc :)
That was not Yahoo/Flickr's fault but the poster's who probably shared a private or otherwise restricted-view set. Normally, Flickr photos and sets are publicly viewable without any login.
I'd be a little skeptical that the electronics for a xenon flash tube could generate enough current for a long enough time to kill a mouse.
However, a pet-sized electric fence charger might work. Several years ago, I had an electric fence around a cherry tree to keep the raccoons from stealing the fruit. One run of wire was about
6" off the lawn, and the other was about 18 off the lawn. One day, I found a dead starling lying on the lawn next to the fence. My working theory is the starling bumped its head on the fence wire and got zapped.
HTH
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Robert Riches
spamtrap42@jacob21819.net
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)
A few years ago I was repairing a Mecablitz electronic flashgun. After each test I would switch off, press the flash button, then discharge the residual charge on the capacitors using a screwdriver across the terminals of the capacitor.
On one occasion I forgot to press the flash button. When I put the screwdriver across the terminals, it blew a hole halfway through the screwdriver, and woke people up several rooms away.
There's a LOT of energy stored there. In this case it was 1000uF at
550 volts. Discharging that in the few milliseconds of a flash is an average current (assuming 5mSec) of 550v * .001F / .005s amps, i.e 100 amps. If the time is less than 5mSec, the current is proportionally higher.
(Incidentally if you are ever tempted to work on such things beware of
2 factors: The tube stops conducting at around 80 volts, so the capacitor will be charged to that after a flash, and the capacitor will recover some charge after being shorted. Short it again 10 seconds later, and you'll likely get another spark. So keep fingers well clear!)
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Alan Adams, from Northamptonshire
alan@adamshome.org.uk
http://www.nckc.org.uk/
I suppose it might have had some kind of heart defect.
As to the photoflash notion, I think there might be about 20 joules involved (but I'm on my second Bloody Mary). Sounds to me as though
20j. might do the job.
If the little critters would just stick to occasional forays to find some food, I might not be so annoyed. But there seem to be mouse superhighways in some quite unexpected places such as behind the washer/dryer. The economy is probably to blame: a lot of empty flats with no heat and no food to help raise baby mice.
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Windmill, TiltNot@NoneHome.com Use t m i l l
J.R.R. Tolkien:- @ S c o t s h o m e . c o m
All that is gold does not glister / Not all who wander are lost
Spend millions redesigning a logo which looks the same.
Mis-identification of ham as spam using stupid sledgehammer rules.
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You could leave out every vessel you have filled with water or fill the bath. Few cats drink more than a pint a week if their food is moist (mice are > 50% water probably).
Cats eat mice. Not feeding would encourage hunting.
A large enough litter tray would be the worst problem!!!
When I lived in a 300 year-old country cottage and the harvest mice came in for the winter for warmth and food, cats were the only thing which kept them at bay. I had to leave the larder open!
A good humane mousetraps is available and consist of a bent square-section plastic tube which 'rocks' when the mouse enters and the door drops shut. It is recommended you remove a mouse within six hours of trapping to avoid death by trauma so you can leave a cat longer than a trapped mouse.
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