How to Keep Mice From Hiding in the Oven
If you find yourself reluctant to host scratching, fussy parasites in your kitchen – and you’re pretty sure you can hear them clattering in your stove and oven – you’re not alone. Mice are attracted to the warmth of the pilot lamp and the abundance of crumbs and food debris in and around the oven. Here’s how to get rid of them.
First, clean the stove in and around it.
Mice rush to ovens and stoves for free food, so the first step is to starve them. Clean the inside of the stove to remove any food debris. Sweep the floor without leaving crumbs and cover all exposed food sources, including trash bags. Check the floor and hob daily to prevent buildup.
Turn off the gas and take out the stove
To inspect the oven thoroughly, you need to pry it off the wall. And for that, if it runs on gas, you need to close the gas valve first so that you can disconnect the gas intake hose from the oven.
Move the slab away from the wall to determine how the mice get there. Sometimes you will find an obvious mouse-sized hole as the culprit (which can be as small as dimes); in other cases, scratches or mouse marks will be your clues. Look behind sinks, near pipes, and around one of the most common entrances, your stove’s gas inlet hose.
Close the oven entry points
While Terminix suggests sealing these entry points with sealant or wire mesh , another approach is to fill the holes with cotton balls soaked in pure peppermint oil and then steel wool, before sealing the hole with putty paste for an extra layer of protection. Then cover this place with cardboard so that the mice do not interfere with your work while it dries – and at a fateful moment they will inevitably try to pull it out of the oven.
Set your traps and then … make things worse
Here the two paths for catching mice diverge. While Thermix advises to seal all holes, install snap traps behind the oven, and repack them frequently (and then call them to finish if that doesn’t work), this Hunker’s article takes a potentially terrible step forward. In it, they suggest placing peanut butter or cheese glue traps or snap-on traps around entry points and along the back of the oven, which seems okay. (If you don’t want them to fall into the glue trap, you can also use non – kill traps.) But that’s not all.
After reconnecting the gas line and re-energizing the valve, you could kick in by turning on the oven ( and brazier, if you’re hardcore) and the heat will force the mice out of any remaining holes you have n’t made. you will see and you will fall into the traps.
“Follow all the fleeing mice that make their way through the glue traps to any mouse holes you may not know about,” they advise. But … what if you can’t see where they came from, let alone follow them fast enough? And an even more disturbing question: what if you close all the holes and they have nowhere else to run? What then? What do I do about the mass murder of mice on my conscience?
If the idea of taking the charred corpses of mice out of the oven makes you shiver, there is another way suggested by my humane husband, who repeatedly asked: “Why are you writing about this again?” Which is honestly a fair question.
If you don’t want to play detective mouse or risk leaving no escape holes, leave one open on purpose. That way, when you turn on the heater, the mice have at least one surefire way to escape. Place traps behind this exit point. Or, if your problem is serious enough and you are willing to spend the money, call a professional exterminator to take care of the problem for you.