Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Here's our story: we live in an old house in a rural area. We often get a few mice when the weather turns cold. We prefer humane treatment of the problem, so we use live-catch traps and relocate the mice and do things like keep all our food in sealed containers and put out cotton balls soaked in peppermint oil, etc. These methods have always worked for us. This year, however, was different. Toward the end of winter, when the mice are usually more keen to be outside anyway, we started seeing droppings. So, we set the live-catch traps out and on one night alone, we caught NINE mice. Clearly, we had a huge and sudden problem. We finally realized that they had built a nest in our unused fireplace vents. We took the grates off, cleaned everything as best we could, and then I started doing some internet searches for humane deterrents. A few years ago, we purchased a small sonic repeller and plugged it into the outlet in our closet-sized pantry. We haven't had a mouse in there since, but I chalked it up more to the fact that all the food was in sealed containers and we sealed up all possible entry points. But I thought, why not try something similar in the living room near the fireplace? ANYTHING was worth trying for the size of infestation we were witnessing. We followed all the recommendations I could find about cleaning up and prepping for the repeller's efficacy. The instructions said that it might take about two weeks before the infestation is gone, and that there could even be some increased activity in that time as the mice are looking for other places to go. We plugged the device in, set the humane traps, and waited. Over the two weeks, we did catch a few mice--not nearly as many as we were previously catching--and then, BOOM, just shy of the two week mark, there were miraculously no more mice. We literally haven't caught a single once since and haven't seen any more droppings anywhere. We have the repeller set on the middle setting and can't hear a thing. Both our toddler and our dog play in the living room regularly, so clearly they can't hear it either. The top setting would clear out any space, I imagine--the sound is so awful it makes your teeth hurt. Thankfully, we didn't have to resort to that setting. The ONLY reason I would only give 4 stars instead of 5 is that the device is so large it takes up the entire outlet. And being that we're in an old house, we don't have that many outlets. So that is slightly bothersome, but completely and totally worth the efficacy of this thing. If we ever come across another infestation, you can bet that we will be ordering another one of these without any hesitation.