Keeping rats out of drains is essential for any domestic or commercial drainage system. Rats can often gain entry through damaged pipes or drains, and once in, could gain entry to your home or business. It is essential to ensure your drainage system is working properly and installed correctly to prevent any infestation or entry of rats.
Rats in Drains
In the UK, sewers are the ideal environment for rats to live, which is why it is important to protect yourself and your property from rodents. The drains of your properties connect to sewers that are teeming with the vermin, so ensuring your drains are in good working order is crucial to protecting yourself from disease-carrying pests. It is also important, depending on the type of drain used by your property, to have additional, specialised measures in place to prevent rat entrance.
Common signs of a rat infestation:
- – Rat droppings found in the property
- – Chewed paper, packaging, cables or plastic
- – Small holes gnawed in walls
- – Scratching noises in the walls, floors or roof
How do I protect my drains from rats?
Preventative measures including valves, barriers and traps can help your drains be protected from rat entry. Rats are great climbers and can make it through small pipes, tight bends and areas with lots of water flow.
Sealed Drainage
Ensuring your drainage is sealed is essential to protect your home or business from rats. Sealed drainage means there are no openings in the pipework between the discharge stack of the home or sewer. Although this does not protect the property from infiltration stemming from the sewer itself, as well as the protection it does offer to homes, it helps stop rats entering the sewer. This type of drainage will require regular access covers for inspection chambers and entry of rods to clear blockages. These should allow maintenance of the drainage pipes from the surface.
Rodent Barriers
Rodent barriers are installed within the pipes to prevent rodent entry to your drainage system, helping to protect your home.
This includes a variety of devices within the pipes such as:
- – Downward facing fins in the discharge stack
- – One way valves in the underground drainage
- – Enlarged sections of the discharge stack to prevent rat climbing
Intercepting traps
Intercepting traps are a U-bend section of domestic sewer pipe made from fireclay. These are also known as the Buchan trap, disconnecting trap or Bristol interceptor. This U-bend is filled with water. Although this trap will prevent sewer smells from escaping the pipes, its worth in protecting against rodents is rather more dubious; they are often easily able to swim through an interceptor trap. Another downside of this type of protection is that it is easily blocked and will require frequent maintenance. Thus, it is crucial that the trap is installed such that a rod can be easily inserted to remove blockages.
Covers & Gratings
Placement of plastic covers or metal gratings that allow the passage of waste but block rats should be placed within the pipes.
Cages
Metal cages are often placed in the ventilation pipes that stem from over the discharge stack, blocking that route for rat escape & entry.
How we professionally remove rats from drains
If you believe there are rats living in your drains, pipes or even home, it is important to try and prevent them from further entry. Rat infestations can develop quickly and therefore it is essential to contact a professional drainage company to ensure the rats are gone, and won’t be able to return.
At Maintain Drains, we offer professional rat removal services. With no call-out fee and competitive pricing, we will work to remove rats from your drains as quickly as possible. All our vans are equipped using the latest drainage technology and we are prepared to solve any drainage problem in either a domestic or commercial property. You can contact our friendly team 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
1. Where are the rats in your drains coming from?
The first step of dealing with rats in drains is to identify where they come from. Rats could enter your drains through cracks in the pipes or root ingress. Rats are good climbers and can navigate through small pipes and other spaces easily.
One way we identify rat entry points is by using a CCTV drain survey. Using the latest technology, our cameras can go through your drains and give a clear image of any animals in the drain, and spot where they may have come from. CCTV drain surveys are one of the quickest and most cost-effective methods to find problems hidden in your drainage system.
2. Fixing rat entry points
Following identification of the entry points, it is important to repair them quickly to prevent more animals from entering the drainage system. How we repair your drain or pipe will depend on the issue. We offer root removal services to repair any tree roots that may have obstructed the pipe. Our no-dig drain relining services can also fix any cracks, holes or similar damage to your drains and pipes without excavation.
3. Future preventative measures
In order to ensure the protection and safety of both your drains and home, we can offer future preventative measures to put rats off for good. We can do this by installing flaps, valves and guards in your drainage system to prevent the rodent’s ability to enter the system.
Our friendly team of drainage experts can also offer you advice and tips on how you can prevent rats from entering your drains again in the future.
