Do mothballs or ammonia help repel bats?

If you have bats in your house then you are probably trying to figure out what you can do to scare these critters out of your home as quickly as possible. You may have even gone out on line to see if there are solutions you can find that will work to get them to go away.



One of the most bantered around ideas is that of using ammonia or mothballs to repel the bats from your home. While these may seem like clever ideas to use to cause the bats to scurry away, the reality is that they simply don’t work. That is just the fact.

Let’s start with ammonia. This is the most useless of the two ideas. If you have ever smelled bat urine you will find that it has a very similar odor that one would find to ammonia. The truth is that the urine and ammonia are very similar in chemical composition. This means that if the bat is not afraid of its own urine then it is sure not going to be afraid of the ammonia. You are just wasting your money.

Mothballs do not work either because of how bats move around. Bats hang in colonies from caves or the ceilings of dwellings. To use mothballs you would have to scrape them on the ceiling of your home to try to deter the bats away. If you put them on the floor the bats will be completely unaffected by them because they are above the mothballs. That is going to do you no good at all.

After some time the mothball residue will wear off on the ceiling, and so any effect that this may have had on the bats will go away as well. You wind up spending a lot of money on something that has limited use, if any at all.

The odor of mothballs only has a very small impact on bats. There actually has to be a great deal of it placed in your home to really do anything at all, and this can make your home smell really bad for very little benefit. It simply is not a solution that proves to be worth the expense. Bats can be a lot of work to get rid of, and clearly you want them out of your home, but if you are wasting your money on these options you are really doing nothing more than throwing your money away. Look for alternatives that actually work.

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