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Comment by VincentEvans | Hacker News Reader

When I was a landlord - i found foggers that I bought at Home Depot very effective. Nuked roach populations between tenants multiple times. Had personal experience living in the same unit - after putting out traps, fogging, and subsequently keeping the place clean - no more roaches. But as soon as nasty people move in, they come back.

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By the way, you mileage may vary based on construction etc, but in brick row homes where I rented - I found that roaches from neighbors weren’t an issue. Once eliminated in my unit - I didn’t see them coming back from the neighbors.

Mice however, were much harder to control. I was never able to completely eliminate them. Nearly but never entirely gone - they travel between shared walls. In a single home - I was able to completely eliminate them relatively quickly and easily, but not in a row home.

I lived in the lower unit of a duplex that was a converted 1880s house and saw mice in the basement and heard neighbors' complaints of mice upstairs, but we never had them on the first floor.

Later we moved to the upper unit and found that when the kitchen was put in to convert the house to a duplex, someone had cut a big hole for the kitchen pipes that left a clear view down to the basement-- and a perfect tunnel for mice. We covered the hole and didn't have any more mice after that.

If you've got mice, you've not got rats ...

If they kept coming back, that means you never really exterminated the population, just got their numbers low. You need to make the population go extinct

Unless the new tenants brought a new colony with them. It's pretty common for people to have eggs inside their electronics and furniture when they move.

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