No, it is NOT ok to leave them in your attic, especially if you plan to sell your home. This will dramatically lower the value of your home until you completely remedy the situation. While bats may be a beneficial creature (aren’t they all?) they are not great house guests and can leave behind quite a mess.
Unless you are truly isolated from them, a bat will eventually find it’s way into the living space and this is where a real health hazard exists. While the chances of contracting rabies from a bat is low, rabies is real and certainly still 100% fatal.
Bats are cool, awesome, and absolutely important to our ecology but sleeping with a wild colony is never advised. I am not supporting killing them or hurting them, in fact I recommend only humane methods. You can of course build a bat house for them if you like but be advised bats tend to go into structures that they prefer and not what we “think” they prefer and so that is why so many bat houses fail. Bats are wild animals and have their own sets of values – most of which we are still learning.
Once you have removed the bats you’ll want to clean up the mess they leave behind. clean-up can be done in many different ways. How you disinfect will be determined by what needs disinfecting. The CDC recommends many different things, I would research that and discuss this with a bat removal specialist.
I am amazed at how much erroneous information is ranking high in the search returns even to this day. On the right, (or lower if your on a mobile device) is a list of the most commonly found misinformation. I hope one-day someone at Google will start fact checking some of these so called experts who clearly have no training, education, or experience dealing with bats but until then I hope you will research and fact check this information so you can actually understand the process of removing bats.
- Myth #1: Bat guano smells and causes a foul odor; Partially true, by itself it is a dry easily crushed matter that doesn’t have much of an odor at all. It can absorb urine. Urine smells.
- Myth #2: Bat guano can be cleaned from a cinder block wall; partially true again, sure you can run a garden hose into it and wash it out but the moisture problems you’ll create together with any remaining feces will almost certainly cause a health issue later on with mold if nothing else!
- Myth #3: You can just wait till all the bats fly out and then just close the hole; Another partial fact here as the bats do fly out and you can then block the hole but the problem is they do not always all fly out. Any remaining bats might wind up in the house with you…
- Myth #4: Everything is sealed up and we still have bats; chances are everything is NOT sealed properly. perform a night watch and a morning watch to see what is going on. You will find the source of the problem
- Myth #5: Just use mothballs; Mothballs are for moths but truth be told if you get enough of them in one place nothing will stay – including you.
- Myth #6: Just use bright lights; no, this does NOT work either because you cannot get enough light concentrated (like the mothball idea) to be effective enough to get rid of bats from your attic.
- Myth #7: Just use essential oils; While there are odors bats do not like you cannot get enough of it in one area to fully get rid of the bats from an attic just like mothballs and bright lights.
- Myth #8: Ultrasonic sound; This one is really hilarious as these sounds degrade fast and cannot go through walls without losing strength.
- Myth #9: Place a bat house next to the opening and the bats will move into that; here we go again with flat out stupidity. even if bats move into it there is no reason to leave the roost and of course why bother trying to lure them into your area in the first place with another roost site if your trying to get rid of them in the first place?
- Myth #10: Getting rid of bats is easy; No it is not.
While many of these home remedies work every once in awhile out of sheer luck you cannot rely on them. I once had a guy tell me he used Holy Water, well I can’t argue with that if it worked!
If you have any questions please send me an email or call!
