wrote:

By the way, you do want to get rid of them - for some reason they
love to chew mains wiring.

So I've heard. I was thinking of getting up into the small roofspace
this saturday with a long cable, the other end would be connected to a
13A plug socket downstairs. By poking the cable in through the
insulation into their home, I may be able to electrocute a few. I'll
just need to be careful not to touch the live part of the cable
myself... Surely this would kill them?

I doubt it would, unless you can get both live & neutral to make
contact (& not touch each other.) The rat is not going to have a very
good connection to earth. They might feel a bit of a tingle but that's
about all.


Life of Grime where the rat had died after chewing one of the wires under
the bonnet of a car?? The heat accelerated decomposition. CSI demonstrated
how even low voltages can kill providing the current crosses the heart. If
that's a human, it must apply to rat surely??
Low voltages can kill - but you need a VERY good connection with LOW
resistance to get enough current to flow.
Skin (and hair I think) have fairly high resistance.
In the CSI episode the skin was wet which lowers the resistance.

Yes, a high voltage will tend to flow around the outside of a body
(think van der Graf generator. The car rat died because of the current a
car battery will kick out, not the fact it was only 12V.

Either way this doesn't sound like a good way to kill rats.

No, poison/traps/shooting them is better.

Peter