We’re still sort of riding on a wave of EV euphoria, and while there has been some backpedaling about calls for automakers to have purely battery EV fleets by some sooner-than-you-think date, we are still very much in an era where electric cars are on the rise. But there still remains one arena where EVs can never approach the performance and prowess of combustion cars: murdering small, underground rodents.
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Yes, you heard me: rodent murder. While, sure, a skillfully driven EV may be able to squash an occasional squirrel or field mouse, but that’s just piecemeal rodent slaughter, and not really useful for those of you who crave the destruction of entire populations of small, warm-blooded, fur-bearing creatures. For those who do desire such things, I just learned about a product that I’m sort of having trouble believing exists, but certainly seems to.
It’s called the Underground Exterminator:
From what I can tell, this is a little rubber fitting designed to interface between your car’s exhaust pipe and a normal garden hose. You then shove the hose down a mole hole or some other opening to a suspected subterranean den of rodents, start your car, let it idle for about 15 minutes, and flood their whole warren with deadly carbon monoxide.
I’m not exactly certain why, but something about this product just feels, I don’t know, unsavory to me. I mean, there are plenty of benefits to it, compared to other methods of killing rodents: it’s painless, most importantly, and it’s quite hassle free, in that you don’t need to lay a bunch of bait or traps or shrink yourself down to two inches tall and go in the holes yourself with an X-acto knife, for the hunt. It’s repurposing your car’s waste products to perform a task you desire. In that context, what’s to complain about?
But I think all of the associations with suicide make this feel so wrong, somehow. And, really, if one was seeking such a thing, isn’t this product effectively a very well-designed tool for accomplishing just that? I mean, I guess you could say the same about all sorts of products out there, like pretty much any cleanser or drain cleaner that’s ingestible or whatever.
Also interesting: the car shown on the box looks a lot like a 1984-ish Buick Le Sabre, only the front, which has been re-purposed into the rear of the car for the illustration on the box:
See what I mean? Also, it’s a bit stretched, vertically. Look at that tire. And the illustration sure makes the exhaust seem like a firey death!
I’m still surprised there are products designed to re-purpose car exhaust. The only other one I was aware of was an old ’50s-era car vacuum system that was powered by your car’s exhaust:
I’d actually like to try this one; it seems the exhaust must be driving some sort of vacuum mechanism, and the dust and crap would get flung out of the exhaust exit there. This setup, while odd, doesn’t seem to have much danger of exhaust inhalation, where the Underground Exterminator is pretty much just that.
I’m impressed with the cleverness of re-packaging a hose clamp and rubber bellows and hose fitting into such a specific and deadly product. I imagine this thing comes with a huge pamphlet of warnings and disclaimers and all sorts of legal talismans to be sure that the makers of the Underground Exterminator, Manning Products, is not held responsible if anyone uses this for nefarious or deadly purposes?
I also wonder if modern cars are still effective for this? I’ve heard some reports that on some cars, exhaust is now so clean that death by inhalation is a lot harder to accomplish? Which is, of course, an overall positive, except in this very specific case where you want to free your land from moles.
Personally, I just have a few cats in my house. They’ve proven very good at eliminating all sorts of rodents, and they often leave me heads and various unidentifiable organs to enjoy myself, right on my office floor!
Even better, the Car Vacuum is dead simple, and just uses the Venturi Effect (and by extension Bernoullis Principles if you want to be nerdy)! The exhaust gas is necked down and immediately back up at the point of the vacuum hose to create a zone of high velocity, low pressure gas, that creates a vacuum on the T that goes to the car!
Pro tip, if you need to siphon ANY liquid out of a vehicle, and you have access to an air compressor and spare tube, you can do this. Cut a slit into the hose, insert your air compressor nozzle, and point it in the direction you want the liquid to flow, and it will create a vacuum. Here’s a link to a youtube video showing how. The car vacuum shown is just a commercialized version of that exact same thing.
I remember my old waterbed had this same extension to suck the water out. You hooked it up to the faucet and ran water through it and it would create a suction on the T-connector. It never really created a very strong suction though, was much easier to just run the hose out the window and put heavy things on the mattress to start the siphon going.
Yep, the asterisk with vacuums like this is that the strength is always dependent on the pressurized thing you’re using to create a vacuum. A faucet is fairly weak (~40 PSI) relative to ambient pressure (~15PSI) acting on the thing in question, while compressed air at 75+ PSI is enough to make things move a bit more quickly.
Now I’m wondering what the PSI would be on a ’55 Beetle’s tailpipe. I also wonder if the pulsing nature of the exhaust would make a difference. I’m guessing not since even at idle the pulses would be around 15-20/second. I agree, Jason needs to find one of these to try it out.
The joys of being an engineer means I could definitely do the math, and my buddy even has a running 72 super beetle, so with the right equipment I could actually find out. Also the nature of being an engineer means I have too many projects already. That said, I really want to find out now
I love how awful it is for everyone not in the car. Not only does it spew air cooled VW-grade exhaust fumes, but also now fires random car floor crud with it like a little cannon! I’ll take two!
My aircooled shoots fireballs because it runs rich. Would I set the vacuum hose on fire?
Well, there’s only one way to find out. For Science!!
Also very common as a method of fish tank vacuum cleaning
Been facing this situation for about 3 years now.
Those things pretty much suck, pardon da pun…
I can piss with 10 times the pressure of my water pressure on the average day.
We finally found him, folks! The winner of Big Bill Hell’s Challenge Pissing!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sZuN0xXWLc
I once ran a generator on my lawn for 24 hours. The grass under the exhaust outlet died – and never came back. 10 years later there was still no grass there.
Generators and other small engine equipment are still quite dirty compared to cars because it would be cost-prohibitive to put things like catalytic converters on them.
When we were kids (decades ago), my brother got two “male” gerbils. Of course, one wasn’t and soon we had many gerbils. We offered the ensuing litters to the pet store for free and they weren’t interested. My dad, who spent his summers as a kid working on a family farm, held a somewhat unsentimental view of animals. He decided we would “exhaust” them as a humane way to solve the overpopulation problem. The first time it worked fine. They second time my brother held the paper bag full of gerbils tight around the exhaust pipe before my dad started the car. When it fired up, it blew the bottom out of the bag and the gerbils all took off across the yard and into the woods. I’m not too clear on cross species propagation, but for years following this incident it seemed like we had some odd looking rodents running around the neighborhood.
When my daughter, years later, wanted hamsters as pets I laid down the law. One hamster.
Maybe they were both male. Have you ever seen the documentary Jurassic Park?
Life, uh, finds a way.
Thanks, I hate it.
I never knew this was a product; I have always just used a dryer vent hose slipped over the tailpipe. I had to do this over the summer because rats were nesting in the front yard and under the sidewalk.
Everyone who is crying about those being cruel, unforgivable, or some horrible sin, I would like you to tell me a friendlier alternative to this that actually works.
With a Tesla you have to put a little speaker in the burrow, with text-to-speech reading out Musk’s tweets.
That’s inhumane 🙁
And the only difference is that the rodents will hot-wire the nearest ICE vehicle and stuff their heads in the exhaust pipe voluntarily.
If South Korea broadcasts them across the DMZ it’d probably be against the Geneva Convention.
This would be perfect for my neighbor’s catless WRX.
If it’s like most modified WRXs, it definitely won’t fit over the storm drain sized exhaust pipe.
If it’s like most modified WRXs, the engine won’t last long enough to create that much exhaust.
Antifreeze is a common way to poison rodents, not sure how well it works when mixed with oil
Wait, you’re implying there is a WRX with a cat somewhere.
Traps and poison are not solving my gopher problems. I’m going to try this.
Try a claymore. It seemed to work for my friend Carl. Well, initially anyway.
Man, he must be pretty good to have any success with a sword that big!
“Personally, I just have a few cats in my house. They’ve proven very good at eliminating all sorts of rodents, and they often leave me heads and various unidentifiable organs to enjoy myself, right on my office floor!”
For future reference: A shop wet/dry vac and hot water can do an amazing job at pulling bloody rodent filled cat puke out of plush wall to wall carpet. Just keep working at the spot till it’s gone, then pour the nasty into the nearest toilet and flush.
To nuke any potential ick from orbit chase the cleaning with some industrial strength probiotic (live culture) enzyme cleaner as directed by the label. It’s the only way to be sure.
Yes I speak from experience. It happened and doing the steps outlined above you’d never know it.
BTW if you think pumping gopher holes full of car exhaust is a gas let me introduce you to the Rodent Blaster:
https://www.rodentblaster.com/Rodent_Blaster.html
The video with the redneck country playing over the top is just too much. That has to be a parody website, right?
Dunno about the website but the product is real:
http://rodenator.eu
https://www.varmitgetter.com
Worth a read:
“Subject: Some Rodent Blaster experiences
We got a Rodentator gopher blaster when they first came out in 2000, I think. I used it for a year or so, then loaned it out to some neighbors. We have it back in the shop, where it sits, mostly unused.
The issues in dealing with it might be unique to Nevada, so judge for yourself.
1. It does work as advertised. If you have a clear hole down to the pest you want to kill, and you fill the hole with the gases in the right proportion, you will kill the critter. You might even cave in their burrow/hole/tunnel.
I’ve killed everything from gophers to badgers with it. So it does work.
2. You need to adjust the mixture of gases before you go trying to kill stuff. My recommendation would be to find about a 3 to 4” diameter pipe, say heavy PVC conduit or pipe, about 10′ long; lay this on the ground, away from windows and confined areas.
Get your eye and ear protection on. Always wear eye and ear protection when using these rodent blasters. And heavy clothes, especially heavy boots. You guys know I’m hardly a subscriber to the nanny-state “pad every corner” ideal, but you’re creating an explosion here, and it is not easy to predict where stuff is about to fly. You might want to wear a broad-brimmed hat to keep dirt from getting in your scalp and down your collar.
You use this as a test blast chamber. The way I tend to do it is get the propane valve open first, then keep adding more and more oxygen until you start to get a “whop!”, then a “pop!” and then you’ll start getting a “wham!” out of test shots in the pipe. When you get it right in the 3 to 4″ pipe, about 10′ long, it will sound like a small cannon going off.
When you shut off the valves on the blaster handle, make a mark on each of the gas valves and record how many turns it took to shut the valve from your ideal setting. Tweeking the mixture in a pest den hole is possible, but setting the gross mixture is very difficult in a non-ideal hole.
3. Now you’re ready to kill sumthin’. Go to your woodchuck, gopher, etc hole. Start out by putting in about 10 seconds flow of gases. Hit the igniter. You will have one of three results if you had the gas mixtures right:
– too little gas – you get this entirely unsatisfactory “pop” and you know darn well the critter isn’t dead.
– just about right – you got a very satisfactory explosion that shakes the ground and leaves you standing upright.
– too much gas – you’re covered in earth, your hide is hurting like you’ve been wihpped, your feet hurt like hell. Oh, and the ground under your feet disappeared into a cloud of flying dirt.
As you learn more about your particular pest, you’ll start having a better idea of how much gas to start with. When we first bought the blaster, the manufacture recommended “oh, about 30 seconds” of fuel for a ground squirrel hole. I am here to tell you that 30 seconds of propane+oxygen down a squirrel hole will cause you, the operator, nearly as much pain as you’re trying to cause to the squirrel. It is way, way too much gas for our squirrel holes. Remember what I said about study boots? If you’re wearing sneakers or skimpy shoes and you put in way too much gas into a gopher or squirrel hole, you will regret not wearing solid shoes for the rest of the day.
4. These things can start fires. Here in Nevada, we have lots of fine-stemmed fuels in the form of grasses. Our local ground squirrels pack quite a bit of cheatgrass and other fine seeds and chaff down into their holes. When I’ve used the blaster, especially near the edges of our farm, I’ve seen tufts of flaming cheat come flying out of the ground 30+ feet away, across a fenceline, and land in sagebrush and weeds. The last thing I need here is a bill from the NDF or BLM for fighting a wildland fire I started, so we don’t use the blaster that much any more. Most of y’all live in areas where you don’t have our particular fire issues, so use your own judgement in your local area.”
https://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=12395&DisplayType=flat
I don’t doubt the product is real. My family used to use an unlit rosebud on a propane tank to fill holes and then something lit on fire (stick, whatever) to light it all up.
This seems a little safer and less “hold my beer”.
Expensive AF though. I wonder if A1 rentals has it.
It also begs the question, how hard can it be to jury rig one from a cheap propane and oxygen torch and a BBQ ignitor?
Perhaps we’ll find out – Next time on Clarkson’s Farm!
This is incredible consumer advice. Man, I love forums.
{ clicks play }
lol of course it’s a Toby Keith song
Too much like the Entlausungswagen for my tastes.
Holy crap, I’m sorry I searched that up.
I prefer exterminating underground pests the old fashioned way; with c4 shaped like woodland creatures
Finally a chance to tell this story about murdering pests wholesale. I was working at an aerospace company that had a hydrogen braze furnace a few decads ago. We flowed 1500 cfs H2 at 2000 degrees through the furnace during operation. During the cooldown period, argon is introduced to prevent oxidation, then nitrogen to make it less dangerous when the furnace was raised off the retort spilling the gas. All this to explain why we had large quantity liquid H2, nitrogen, and Argon tanks outside. The furnace was inside the building and down in a 40 foot deep pit. For safety reasons, there were floodlights on at all times which made the space nice and warm. Also outside, across the road is a chunk of concrete that used to hold something. Standing on the edge of this concrete pad one could look down and under to see a nest of rattlesnakes. Everyday when coming to work, one would have to very carefully open the door, look carefully for snakes in the transport tracks inside the building, and any snakes that had fallen into the pit. We finally got fed up with the quantity of rattlesnakes and asked the powers that be if they could deal with the snakes. No, they said, we are not allowed to kill them with poison. The main operator had a brilliant idea and executed it without telling the anyone ahead of time. A small tube was run from the liquid Argon tank across the road and down into the snake den. The denser-than-air argon flooded into the den pooling up and the snakes that didn’t freeze suffocated. Some time after that, I looked down and saw rabbits in the den.
And then you had to re-introduce the snakes into the den to fix the rabbit problem, right?
I get it Jason, you’re a journalist and you must report the facts. But, eff this and the people that came up with it. Please just tell me you got distracted for a moment and are now back to staring at tail lights.
Guys we found the mole
We had something like this in our shed at one time, except it was meant for wasps and ended in a vacuum cleaner brush attachment. This was, as you can imagine, not a professional product but some home-made redneck shit. That someone made a professional product out of the same idea is indicative that money comes before safety I guess.
I wonder what sort of damage an entire nest of angry disoriented wasps would do to the exhaust system of a car? I’ve certainly seen what they can do to a convertible with a gap in the roof.
Teslas may not kill squirrels but they’re half decent at killing tesla drivers who believe in autopilot
This just feels so ‘of an era’ it’s hilarious. I’d put this on my shelf right next to a set of Lawn Darts.
The cottage community I used to visit in the summer as a kid called them Darwin darts. It was years before I knew who Darwin was. I guess I’m a survivor…
But, hey, think of all those people who celebrate by firing their guns in the air. They will probably survive too.
Or public sale of powerful fireworks.
The people who fire the guns into the air always survive, because the terminal velocity’s not really high enough to be deadly if they shot straight up. It’s other people further away who end up dying, when they shoot at an angle instead of straight up.
I can’t find a clip, but one of my favorite scenes from FX’s You’re The Worst put this technique to hilarious use as a bunch of LA weenies try to figure out how to humanely euthanize a mouse found in the house.
I have an old lawnmower I rigged up to do this
Some people use cats to control pest problems. This lets you use catalytic converters!
Cats don’t always work, sometimes they make a bigger problem because of toxoplasma gondii
And that’s when you have to do a cat delete.
or worse…ALLERGIES!
Also the whole razor blades for hands thing, which compliments the unpredictable mood swings quite nicely
When I was a kid it was common to just shove one end of a garden hose into the exhaust pipe and the other end into a gopher hole. That was how I learned about the poisonous nature of vehicle exhaust. Modern cars put out maybe 1/100 of the rodent-killing poisonous gases now, so this might be a bit late to the market. The plastic funnel end which is hose-clamped to the exhaust pipe will probably melt into a gooey mess after 30 minutes of hugging the hot metal.
There also used to be Gopher Gassers, which you would light like a firecracker and shove into a gopher hole, and quickly seal up with loose dirt. It would smoke something fierce (and they stank terribly) and fill up all the tunnels with something highly toxic. They were, apparently, outlawed decades ago.
You beat me to both of these. I helped my dad kill some moles that were beginning to infest our garden with a hose and his ’73 Ford F250 with the 460 big block.
I also watched my neighbor start a wild fire with one of those stinky gopher gasser smoke bombs. They didn’t pay attention to the instructions and placed it in a hole beneath a bush and lit the bush on fire. It was a windy day and the embers blew onto the brush, which went up and then blew embers into their grazing field next door. It fortunately didn’t jump the road to our fields, but it was quite the show for ten year old me.
Time to break out the old lawnmower then.
Finally a circumstance in which my two-stroke is probably more efficient.
“I’m still surprised there are products designed to re-purpose car exhaust.”
Search “exhaust inflated jack” Still a heck of a lot of them, apparently big in off road, David probably knows. I remember seeing them in a JC Whitney catalog many, many, moons ago.
Add car jack to your list of exhaust powered things: https://www.exploringoverland.com/overland-tech-travel/2023/10/24/the-arb-bushranger-exhaust-jack-yea-or-nay
I can’t imagine that vacuum works well. I figure it’s either spinning an impeller or it’s a venturi vacuum pump (I think it’s the latter). It’s not even a high compression or large displacement engine, so it won’t have much volume or pressure. I used one of them to charge vacuum tanks via an air compressor to suck oil out of boats.
As a home owner, I hate small rodents. Still wouldn’t use this thing. With the number of animals and burrows and the multiple exits they use, I wonder easy it would be to find them and how well it would work with a newer car. Also, we have snakes and I would think some of them live in holes in the ground and I don’t want to kill them. Or rabbits. Deer mice, though, can go to hell. They’re only good as food for better animals (all of them). Better than using that poison that kills the animals that eat them, though.
Jason just so wrong. I recommend a viewing of caddy shack. Most rodent vermin have multiple exits. This muffler sock is unlikely to do shit.
This item is most likely geared towards the fedora wearing man Deutsch with a man bun who pretends he is back to our ancestors but needs Velcro shoes
It’s actually unnervingly effective, and professional exterminators use essentially the same technology. (I am not sure they source their CO from the tailpipe of a 1984 Buick LeSabre, though I am sure that upgrade could be requested upon payment of the appropriate fee.)
Carbon monoxide is about the same density as air, so when pumped underground it tends to stay underground – even if the vermin manage to escape via another hole, they basically can’t return to their burrow until the gas dissipates, by which time the local raptor population has taken advantage of the free buffet.
The symptoms of poisoning (dizziness, confusion, drowsiness, etc.) also mean that escape is not typically top of mind. That’s why it’s also extremely dangerous for humans who leave the motor running in the garage, or run the engine with the exhaust blocked, etc.
I’ve had skunks in my yard. I don’t particularly care, but they stink things up and make it impossible to leave my windows open on a spring evening. We also have possums, foxes, deer, cats and a passel of squirrels.
Contacted the Ag department and they provided a plastic box w/ a bait cup at one end and a trap door at the other. When a skunk takes up residence, it is usually asleep in the morning. The Ag department trapper comes around and puts a wand dispensing CO2 into the tilted up box. When the box has been filled w/ CO2, he turns a garden hose into the box to drown the little stinker. No rude smells and a vermin dispatched.
We have skunks too and they are fine, even when slapped in the face by a cat doing his best Will Smith impersonation.
I like the skunks, they are cute and they – along with the opossums – keep my yard free of bugs and slugs.
Skunks have occasionally ripped our lawn up, digging for grubs. Not really a killin’ offense, in my opinion, though they really did a thorough job this year.
My skunks go for grubs too but in my case the damage is minor. The real lawn damage is done by raccoons.
When I was a kid we had a pet skunk.
I don’t remember if he was fixed or not.
But he took a ton of shit from our cat on a daily basis.
Almost like a Warner Bros cartoon.
I’ve seen that happen more than once. I guess skunks just have a too temptingly punchable face to a cat.
My cousins husband worked for the Y. They had a fixed/de-odorized skunk on premises. They are rather cute, but when the smell outside your window wakes you up in the middle of the night,… needs must.
I think it’s mildly sadistic to trap and kill an animal just because you don’t personally like the way it smells.
It also does nothing as nature hates a vacuum. A new skunk will just move in.
Would you please tell my wife that? She’s been bugging me to take a shower for weeks now.
Skunks in the wild are recognized as vectors for rabies. Otherwise, the Ag department would not send out trappers to catch them. They don’t trap possums, foxes and squirrels (although squirrels are probably likely vectors too.
I made friends with a skunk, Lockheed, who would travel through my apartment yard years ago and he would just about eat out of my hand. He didn’t stink at all from a few feet away. Now all the weed-smoking POS humans everywhere OTOH . . .
Did you mean douche?
I’m not sure I understand who this product is for. Someone who aspires to be a redneck but isn’t redneck enough to just attach the hose with duct tape?
This is definitely an invention born from a “hold my beer” moment.
This thing has ‘klan’ written all over it.
Racist rednecks can accomplish this without overpriced crappy product. This item has manbun city Deutsch written All over it.