I’m just about to order some essential oils for my mice. Along with an essential oil diffuser. The poor things seem a bit stressed of late, and I figure that a bit of aroma therapy might help them more nearly align their chakras and generally improve their auras.
That’s sarcasm. Mostly.
Mice are vermin. Full stop. Yet I am, in fact, purchasing an essential oil diffuser and some essential oils for my mice.
It’s as logical as 1-2-3. 4 maybe 5.
1: Mice like my garage.
Source: Clipart library.com
I’m now into Swedish Death Cleaning, the Garage Phase. Just another in an ongoing series of attempts to get rid of stuff.
Currently I’m going through my detached garage. Figuring out what can be given away. What’s good for scrap metal. What’s trash. What has to go to the household toxic waste station at the local dump solid waste transfer station. And so on. The idea is to return this space to its original intended use a hobby woodshop.
But for now, the main issue is that it’s filthy. Just filthy. And the principal source of the filth is mice. And all that mice do. And do. And do. In every conceivable location in that garage.
So, as long as I’m cleaning it out, I want to add some rodent repellents. Ideally, some effective rodent repellents.
2: Mice hate peppermint.
Or so they say.
It’s not as if I haven’t tried rodent repellents before. It’s just that what I’ve tried has failed. And, I suspect that, as with my long and winding road for deer repellents, what will and will not work will be highly dependent on circumstances.
In any case, there appears to be some research suggesting that, if given alternatives, mice will stay away from areas heavily scented with peppermint, cinammon, wintergreen, and similar. Let me just summarize that by saying that mice hate peppermint.
3: Commercial mouse repellents are expensive, per unit of peppermint.
So I go to the Home Depot website and look up their top-rated mint-based rodent repellent. They will cheerfully sell me a gallon of it for $34. Reading the fine print, I see that what they are selling me is a gallon of water, with a little squirt of peppermint oil in it. Above, the first ingredient is soap, followed by 0.5% peppermint oil.
So I’d be paying $34 for a little over half an ounce of peppermint oil. Call it $60 an ounce or so. Plus some other stuff. Of which, arguably, the cinnamon oil has value as a rodent deterrent.
(I note, parenthetically, that I have tried “sachet-style” rodent repellents before, without notable success. Hence my focus on liquids.)
4: Peppermint essential oil is cheap, but volatile.
Source: Amazon.com
Meanwhile, on Amazon, I can buy four ounces of peppermint essential oil (of unknown quality) for maybe $12. Plus, it’s Energizing!
That price strikes me as about fair, as the stuff is more-or-less a weed. My wife has mint patches established in several flower gardens, and it’s not so much a question of cultivating it, as keeping it in check.
As a bonus, the comments show that people do, in fact, use it as mouse repellent.
The drawback is that you need to keep reapplying it. Recommendations seem to be to strew oil-soaked cotton balls around, and re-soak them once or twice a week.
That’s way too much work. There has to be a better way to do this.
5: Essential oil delivery systems are cheap.
Source: Amazon.com
People who are into essential oils as room fragrances use some sort of system to deliver the scent. You can simply warm a puddle of oil. You can mix the oil with water and run it through an ultrasonic humidifier.
Or, you can buy a gizmo that will periodically spritz the essential oil into the air. Said gizmo generally being called an “air freshener”.
In the end, I went with the $11 Air Wick Essential Mist. It’s a battery powered air freshener that uses a small bottle of essential oil, and spritzes that into the air every few seconds, eight hours a day. Again, per those useful Amazon comments, you can pry the lid off the bottle and replace the contents with the essential oil of your choice. Each fraction-of-an-ounce bottle should be good for about a month.
As mice are nocturnal, I’ll set that up to spritz at night.
The only obvious negative is that, by reputation, these eat batteries. But with an exposed battery compartment, that can be easily fixed by hard-wiring a wall wart to replace the three AAA batteries.
Edit: Contrary to what The Internet told me, pure peppermint oil does not work with this device. It won’t atomize it, or, at least, not at unheated-garage temperatures. I redid this, mix pure peppermint oil roughly 50/50 with vodka. That now seems to be working. The upshot is that you need to thin the oil, and it looks like vodka (water and alcohol) will work OK.
Ergo, my mice need aroma therapy. Q.E.D.
As I said, completely logical, linear and rational. My little air-freshener-as-mouse-repellent costs about $25 to set up, and the four-ounce bottle of peppermint oil should last for maybe half-a-year. That’s all plus-or-minus battery replacements. And it will require monthly maintenance to refill the essential oil container.
If nothing else, the garage is going to smell a whole lot better than it does now.
It might even keep the mice away. We’ll see.
