Classic RZC001-4 Indoor Electronic Mouse and Rat Trap - 1 Electric Trap

At first we heard noises in the walls. The next night something ran across our living room floor causing my wife to scream "what's that!". "Looks like we have a rodent problem." I said back. I thought to myself, I'll make short work of this pesky intruder. I got a couple of our mouse traps out from the cupboard and plated them with gobs of creamy peanut butter and placed them behind the refrigerator. I was expecting the offender to practically float in air on the fumes as they were helplessly drawn to their doom.That night not long after the wife and I were in bed, I heard the telling report from one of the traps wire jaw slamming closed. Game, set, match, got him! I jump out of bed to expunge the pest from our home. Turns out that I was celebrating prematurely. The trap was devoid of any creatures."Sorry, that happens sometimes..." is a phrase I use more than I care to admit. And I would be saying again to my wife shortly. With the trap reset and it's trigger right on the edge, ready to explode like a leopard coming out of the bushes on a gazelle, I headed back to deliver my disappointing news. The furry creature was no doubt laughing at my defeat.The following morning I revisited my previous night's disappointments and "Holy smokes Batman!" the trap was sprung again! However, it was still as empty as a Guinness on St. Patrick's Day. Third time's a charm I thought. I reset the trap with extreme prejudice and I was off to work muttering under my breath. A few days would pass with no activity on the trap.Late one night I was picking through a few cords on the guitar and out of the corner of my eye I saw some motion. I look over and see a giant rat sitting on a box behind our couch. He probably came out to play a little Dueling Banjos. Our eyes locked for just a second. As he held my gaze he must have sensed my intentions were disingenuous, and then in a flash he was gone. As he disappeared under the couch I sprang to my feet with the guitar ringing inharmoniously. I flipped the couch on it's side expecting to give a country line dance stomping all over his little rat body. He made a break for the refrigerator and disappeared into a hole behind it.Yes a hole! The little devil had actually chewed a large hole in our kitchen cabinets so big that you wouldn't need to have even half the skills of Tiger Woods to putt a hole in one from across the room!Now that I knew what I was dealing with, I realized that these tiny mouse traps were not going to cut it. I had no choice but to break out "Big Bad Mamma Jamma", a rat trap so bad to the bone that it would make George Thorogood studdar. "You brought this on yourself rat" I chuckled as I pried it's bone crushing jaw back and locked it into place.Big Bad Mamma Jamma gleamed in the moonlight near some wood shavings from the freshly chewed hole in our cabinets. Surreptitiously waiting for the rat to make it's move. It's aura was so powerful and so wicked that the rat must have known it's danger. A full week passed by with no body cleaving action from the blood thirsty trap. The rat begin to get more daring and more brazen about making appearances. We spotted it several more times and could hear it practically dancing a jig under our cabinets and in our walls at night.Knowing the rat liked to be constantly on the move and also where it liked to go, I set glue traps out next. I had more stickiness in our house than a Spiderman convention at the Elmer's Glue factory. "With great power, comes great responsibility" and mine was to now to bond this rat in it's tracks, smothered by a glue cocoon to the level seen in the movie the Fly II where Martin hatches.Nothing was caught in the glue traps over about 3 days time. It was clear that they were not working. Feeling that the rat was about to claim squatters rights and take our home, I began searching for something else. The area around our couch had started to smell of rat urine and had to be disinfected."You like to eat rat! I've got just the thing!" I said to myself as I ordered a 5 lb. bucket of poison from Amazon and some special containers to keep the dog out of harm's way. I set up 4 poison bait locations, any one of which would have made Bret Michaels proud. The poison had warning all over it and I didn't like the idea of putting in our house, but we had tried many other things and we were at a point where we needed results.Later that night I heard the rat enter one of the boxes. Yes! He was shaking it around and really going to town on the bait. With Templeton from Charlotte's Web's song ringing in my ears "a veritable smorgasbord-orgasbord-orgasbord. After the gates are shut. Each night, when the lights go out, it can be found, on the ground, all around. That's where a rat can glut, glut, glut, glut!" I knew this was finally going to work!The following night there was complete silence. Could it be! We thought the poison had worked and life could finally return to normal. I left the poison out just in case there were more. Maybe another week went by with nothing, until one night... There is was. Again. Running across the floor. How could this be? I left the poison just as before, but the rat wouldn't touch it. I put seeds and peanut butter around the poison blocks. The rat would eat them all, but wouldn't touch the poison. The previous rat must have taken my phone in the middle of the night and got on rat Twitter and tweeted about the poison before he kicked the bucket. This rat or what might have now been rats, as in more than one, wouldn't touch it. They were busy making a lovely nest out of the foam from the inside of our couch. It was probably constructed to the level of a Buckingham Palace for rats.Being curious about the rat, I purchased some live traps from Amazon. They had a little door that would spring closed trapping it's victim inside what looked like a miniature transparent mailbox. I envisioned myself trapping the rat and taking him to court for past due rent and damages. Or maybe performing medical experiments on him to further the understandings of science. The package came with 6 traps that I put slices of an orange and sunflower seeds inside. I made little trails of seeds leading into the opening.The rat had eaten the seeds and even reached inside the live traps taking the first couple inches worth of seeds to eat. He would not go in far enough to set off the trap and be caught. This rat was so smart I bet he would have beat me at a game of Jeopardy. I was out of ideas. To make it worse my wife was on me to get rid of our rat problem. She wanted to call an exterminator and pay several hundred dollars without even a guarantee that our rat problem would be remedied. I begged her, please let me try one more thing. Reluctantly she agreed to give me 10 days time, and I had to show a confirmed kill to prove whatever I did was working.I frantically searched Amazon for products and watched YouTube videos from rat exterminators. During my research I found the Rat Zapper Classic on Amazon. I decided to give it a go. With Amazon Prime shipping available, two days later it arrived at our front door. I opened the package and pulled out the blue plastic trap. Greeted by the picture of a lighting bolt going across a rat's head on the side, it made me smile. It's plastic was thicker than I expected and seemed rugged. It had a lite smell, like a typical injection molded, off shore manufactured part would smell. The battery housing at the top opens to slots for 4 AA batteries. I got some peanut butter and put it on the execution plate deep within the trap. It was difficult to reach it with my hands and I had to use a butter knife to get the proper placement. I made a trail of seeds leading to the entrance of the trap. I knew the rat like this because it would always eat them from the entrance of the live traps. After turning on the power switch the trap made an audible electric buzzing noise for about 5 seconds. This is was most likely the charging of high voltage capacitors used to deliver the lethal shock. I imagined the dry sponge execution of Eduard Delacroix from the Green Mile. Moisture should be kept away from the trap.The next morning I went to check the trap. From across the room I could see what appeared to be a tail protruding from the end! A confirmed kill! And on the first night too! This thing works! Eureka! My wife and I couldn't be happier! I didn't even need to touch the rat. I switched off the trap and carried the whole thing out to the trash. I dumped the little bugger in, and took the trap back inside to bait again in case there were more. The kill came at not a moment too soon. I was about to try bucket traps, then on to voodoo dolls and satanic rituals.This solved our rat problem when nothing else worked!

This is a review of the Rat Zapper Classic RZC001-4 Indoor Electronic Mouse and Rat Trap .Sometimes it kills the rat or mouse. So far I've gotten 1 big rat and 2 mice. But sometimes I can see some fur and residue in the chamber, but no dead animal. So it looks like the poor critter got zapped for 2 minutes, and then the zapping stopped, he recovered and backed out. I no longer recommend it. The text below is from my earlier review from before I discovered it wasn't reliably killing the rat or mouse.Added March 20, 2024: The big rat and the 2 mice are all it ever caught. After that, it didn't catch anything. Lowering rating to 1 star.The instructions call for placing bait on the back wall. But how do you make peanut butter, which is a good bait, stick to a vertical metal surface that you can barely reach through the front opening? I did surgery on mine. I cut a rectangular hole in the back about 0.6 inches high and about 1.25 inches wide. I found the magnet part of one of those things that are used to hold name tags in place on lapels or shirts. I glued a small bottle cap to the active side with a glue gun. Now I put the peanut butter in the bottle cap, slide the cap through the rectangular hole, and the magnets grab the metal back and hold it in place.Here is how it works. (I learned all this from US Patent 6836999.) There are two metal plates, one that is the main floor and back, with a rectangular cutout near the bait. There is a second slightly smaller plate in cutout area. The circuit monitors the conductivity between the plates, and when it detects continuity, it applies a series of high voltage pulses across the plates. There are about 200 pulses per second, and they continue for about 2 minutes. (The patent says 20 seconds, but in the one I have they continue for about 2 minutes.) Here is how the high voltage pulses are generated. There is a inductor similar to the coil on older car engines, only smaller. A transistor applies 6 volts from the battery to the low voltage winding. This builds up a magnetic field in the inductor. Then the transistor quickly shuts off. The magnet field then collapses, inducing a high voltage in the high voltage winding.By the way, I am quite sure that the patent is for this device. On the circuit board the resistors and capacitors are labelled with screened on legends. They match the designations in the diagram in the patent.