If it's a car engine, I don't see any problem as long as the exhaust is not restricted. If it's a small engine, the only thing I can see is that it might overheat if the exhaust is restricted. If the muffler starts to glow orange, I would stop.

I think it's a gimmick intended to sucker people out of their money. I'll bet if you use the fuel line magnets, you'll get beter results.

As for safety, an old neighbor of mine almost killed himself trying to "smoke" out a skunk from under his house using this method.

I wish you guys would actually check the link I provided.

Yes, it's a car engine. I don't know if this convertor thing will restrict the exhaust, that's why I am asking.

I looked and I believe the garden hose might be too much restriction. Why not go to a home supply place and get 2 inch or larger drain hose without perforations and use that. I don't see any problem there.

Repeat of my post on the Cars forum:

12 years ago we had a terrible mole problem in the veggie garden after a winter of exceptionally heavy rain. Thot I'd cut a fat hog and piped the xost from my old P/U into the tunnel network which covered the garden. Let it run a long time. Well I stood there watching things and after a while didn't feel so damn very good. IN fact got sicker'n'ell.

The xost drove me out of the garden - not the moles.

THIS IS THE DEAL!!!!

Go here and watch the video. This works.

Here is a link that might be useful: Moles be gone

Be sure to keep it away from your septic and house/sidewalk/patio and anything flammable. Some guys around here were propaning gophers and started a fire that burned a Christmas tree farm and some buildings. It cost them $100's of thousands of dollars in damages.

However, a friend tells me that if the engine is forced to run for 15-30 minutes exhausting into a garden hose, it might get damaged before the 30 minutes were up.

What do you think?

***********************************************************

Personally, I disagree with your friend. Your vehicle would be sitting there at idle. The volume of exhaust at idle is minor compared to the volume of exhaust at highway speeds. An internal combustion engine is nothing more than an self-propelled air compressor. It takes air in and it compresses it. Then the air is allowed to escape via the exhaust system. The fuel added to the air provides the self-propulsion for this to take place.

If air cannot escape then whatever is preventing the escape will either be blown off or the engine will quit because it cannot get rid of the air.

To kill moles, you need a hose small enough to go into their burrow holes. As long as they are actually in the burrow and there is no back door, this device has a good chance of doing what it claims.

The Rodenator will cost you about two grand minimum because you need a propane cylinder and an oxygen cylinder (both filled) in addition to the $1800.00 plus shipping they charge for this outrageously overpriced product.

The big advantage for the Rodenator is speed. The varmint doesn't get much time to figure out that rapid flight is needed in order to survive. The exhaust method takes a lot longer and the exhaust noise may cause the rodent to exit.... stage left, before the carbon monoxide can really affect it.

MAN!!! Those guys are in love with that product.

Having spent 40 years in product development, I design / fabricate most anything I need so I never even looked at their pricing. Thats alot of money for what it is. Guess they are trying to get their money back in a hurry.

It was about the mid nineties when the Rodenator type design showed up at the Ag Show in Portland Ore. My neighbor and I wanted to evaluate using propane and oxygen to exterminate gophers. We used an oxygen regulator, a car coil, switch, spark plug, and a battery and other odds and ends to make a system to fill the tunnels with correct mixture that was then ignited. One of our wheat fields had a lot of goghers, we experimented over a number of days starting out with filling the tunnels only a few seconds at a time. The next day we would look to see if we killed the owner of that tunnel. We found out that we needed to run the mixture into the tunnel for well over a minute to show any results. (kill the gopher). The explosion made the field look like it had been plowed. The cost of the oxygen makes this a costly way to kill gophers, we got about 20 blasts per 100 cu- ft of oxygen.

"The cost of the oxygen makes this a costly way to kill gophers, we got about 20 blasts per 100 cu- ft of oxygen"
*****************************************************

Wow, that would sure make it an expensive tool to use. Unless you see a gopher actually go into a tunnel, you don't know for sure that he is in there. You could be blowing up a lot of empty tunnels, which probably isn't a bad thing. After all, no point keeping the house fit for occupancy if you are trying to keep out the trespassers.

I suppose one also has weigh the cost of damaged livestock against the cost of each gopher kill. Of course, the Rodenantor people make no mention about gas costs. If I was a pro-exterminator, I think tanks of liquid oxygen would be the preferred choice.

I usually just string one of the varmints up, and leave him
hangin, as a deterrent to the others.
Fish

I had some decent results feeding powdered red pepper into woodchuck holes with a leaf blower. You really need goggles and a respirator for this.

Q. What is A Catalytic Converter?
A. It is a device which chemically converts harmful exhaust gases, carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons, produced by an internal combustion engine, into harmless carbon dioxide and water vapor.
IF, and I say IF, I was to try something like this I would hook it up to an engine that does not have a catalytic converter AND keep an oxegen tank with a face mask at hand.
Hope and pray you don't need it!
You don't say what your garden pests are.
If they are moles, my grandpa (God rest his sole) always swore by Wrigleys chewing gum.
Ground hogs, a .22.
What are you trying to get rid of besides weeds?

"What are you trying to get rid of besides weeds?"

Don,

At this point, I really don't know.

At first I thought it was the groundhogs who were munching on the flower buds. Lots of bachelor buttons, nigellas, coreopsis and most of the sunflowers lost their buds; 95% of the black eyed Susans/gloriosas/rudbeckias have been eaten to the ground. The sunflowers, some of them have lost their buds but many have lost all their leaves as well.

However, there are lots of threads on GW about squirrels and chipmunks eating flower heads. I could try and get rid of the groundhogs but
how the heck does one get rid of squirrels/chipmunks? There must be dozens of them in the woods. Can't spend the whole day shooting squirrels.

What critter will eat the bud of a 5' sunflower without breaking the stem? Sometimes it will eat all the leaves and the bud and sometimes just the bud, leaving the leaves alone.

What critter eats only the buds of a coreopsis or a nigella and leaves the rest of the plant alone?

I don't know but it sounds like deer.
I have lots of fox squirrels (Harvested about 15 to 20 last fall and you can't tell it. Still have plenty.) and the only thing they seem to bother is the peaches and sweet corn and the corn is protected with an electric fence from about a week or two after tassel until harvest. Between the squirrels and the coons I wouldn't have any corn without the fence. And it is easy to put up and take down and store.

You could try a dog.
One running loose that likes to hunt.

"Q. What is A Catalytic Converter?
A. It is a device which chemically converts harmful exhaust gases, carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons, produced by an internal combustion engine, into harmless carbon dioxide and water vapor"

There is a lot more comming out of a catalytic tail pipe than CO2 and H2O. So people haven't committed suicide in newer cars?

DanMan1

I agree.
"There is a lot more comming out of a catalytic tail pipe than CO2 and H2O."
But if you follow the link at the top of this thread to the "Underground Exterminator" it says;
"In a study using only an 8% concentration of gasoline engine exhaust (Normal car emission is 100%), rodents collapsed in 40 seconds and death occurred within 6 minutes."

With todays cars running so much cleaner, in part due to the catalytic converter, I don't believe death is going to occur within six minutes.

First, for all of the animal right to life people, lets face facts. There are times when you need to put an animal down.

You can catch a groundhog in a catch it alive type trap and then what do you do with it?
(Don't want to use a leg trap, that is a good way to end up with a three-legged cat. Nor a conibear trap, a good way to kill something you don't want to.)
Don't want to shoot it, the bullet could hit the trap and damage it or worse it could bounce off something and damage me.
In the past, I could put the whole trap in a garbage bag and inflate it with the tailpipe from the old truck and tie it off. Then in less time than it would take me to dig a hole, maybe ten minutes, the trap would be ready to empty.
But the old truck is gone now and I have tried that only one time since. After a half hour the darned thing was still kicking around in there. OK, just be patent, it will soon run out of air. Another hour, and still quite lively.
Now, I must admit that the old truck did burn some oil, (part of the reason it's gone now).

So, I'm not saying the exhaust from a catalytic converter is 100% safe, far from it. But do you run the exhaust into the burrow of an animal for 15 to 30 minutes and expect it to kill everything?

Maybe with my old truck.

I use a Havahart to catch skunks in my small orchard ( they eat my peaches on lower branches). I just carry the skunk in the cage down to the pond and give it a swimming lesson. No mess, quiet, and it cost's nothing.

I tried the commercial ELIMINATOR. The rubber cap that goes over the tail pipe was way too big, and the c-clamp just buckled the rubber & did not seal, so I had lots of exhaust leaks. I returned and got my money back. Then I used a 3/4 inch heavy duty garden hose 100 ft long. I put the big cap end inside the tail pipe about 2 inches, and tightly duct taped it, The amall end I put into the mole hole. The first hole was a dead end and the back pressure popped off the duct tape connection immediately. So, I check my second mole hole to make sure it was open. then inserted my hose. My car ran on idle for over 1 hour without any problems, and I did not detect any exhaust smells in the area. I walked the yard looking for any air holes the mole might have made, I crushed & sealed a few. I don't know that I found them all. So there could have been enought leakage of fumes just going up the open air holes and NOT down into the 5-6 foot deep mole living areas. I will be looking for new mole runs and if I don't see any I will call this a success. The hose itself had a slight bit of warmth to it, but it was laying out in full sun so it could have been that also.My cousin suggested that I put a little bit of transmission fluid into my gas tank to create a lot of smoke that would seep up from any open air holes. I did not try this. Reasons: might damage my engine, or if I have smoke coming up from several holes in my yard I think the neighbors (not being aware of what was going on) might call the fire department fearing there was some really bad fire risk happening in my yard. I could be in a lot of trouble if this happened.PS my car is a Nissan Sentra 1996 model with 70,000 original miles. I did not note any damages to my exhaust system after using this hose method. I had my brother check engine, etc. out for me. Darla

A quart of ATF to ten gallons of gas wouldn't make alot of smoke, not sure if it would make any difference to the moles?
It want harm the engine, actually good for it...

I used this product with great success and had
no damage and I even used it over several months.
Each time I solved the problem but was invaded
a woodchuck and got him too after I got my mole
problem solved.
One guy wrote that the rubber coupler wasn't an
exact fit. If he read the explantion it doesn't
have to be an exact fit and apparently it was
designed not to be an exact fit so that 80 or 90%
goes thru the hose and the other escapes thru the
rear of the coupler to prevent back pressure on
the engine. Pretty clever but more importantly
I don't have any more critters and I plan on
using it again if I get any.

Many year ago when I had a bad mole problem, I tried mole traps, gunfire, etc, with no good results. I then tried exhause gas by using a standard garden hose held in the exhause pipe of my 1968 pontiac with a rag around it for a seal. After about 10 minutes at idle speed, the moles were laid to eternal rest. It worked great for me. Now, I just control the grubs, taking away the food for the moles.

Charles Ranheim

Could I suggest an alternate?

Get an old lawnmower, or anything that takes a muffler that you can remove. You'll find that the threads on a garden hose will fit a threaded plumbing adaptor that you can find in any plumbing section. this can also thread into the engines muffler tap. (some engines can take a garden hose without the adapter.

Also small engines don't need Catalytics, nor are they as efficent as a cars.

I may be wrong, bit I would think attaching a rubber or plastic hose close to an air cooled engine would not work very long. The heat would melt the hose. The exhaust gasses from a car can also be hot, but at least it has traveled the length of the exhaust system before reaching the hose. I have seen mufflers on a small engine get cherry red in the dark, leading me to believe the exhaust leaving the engine head is close to being a flame. Just my opinion. Charles Ranheim

Well, yeah, that was more sarcasm than anything. I'm trying to show how rediculous this product is.

Car exhaust is not a real humane way of killing things.

If you shoot it, it dies quickly. It does not suffocate to death like the above mentioned products. If you really want to get rid of pests like that, put a oneway door trap over one hole, and flush it out with the other hole.

Personally, I flush em out, and nail em with a .22 or my shotgun.

"I use a Havahart to catch skunks in my small orchard ( they eat my peaches on lower branches). I just carry the skunk in the cage down to the pond and give it a swimming lesson. No mess, quiet, and it cost's nothing."

Doesn't this contradict the idea of the Havahart trap?

Dear Mole-Troubled people,

Here's my experience report one day after using the underground Exterminator. I ordered one online from Ace Hardware after trying out all other possible solutions on the market. Poisoned worms, castor oil granules, castor oil seeds, harpoon trap - none of them seemed work. The mole used to happily throw all the poisoned worms out its tunnel without eating them, which is dangerous for other wildlife, or more importantly, if you have small kids who play in the yard. The mole would trigger the harpoon trap and peacefully escape, raising my hops in vain every time. Even my pest control company had no better ideas than throwing more poison into my yard. Every morning I would wake up to see new mounds, even in December when they are supposed to be *least* active. These products advise us to wait till Fall and Spring when it is easiest to get rid of the moles, but they do not tell you that these little crits would dig up your whole yard in the meantime. So waiting was not an option for me. It got so bad, I started dreaming of different ways I would catch the mole.

So I had to get rid of him/her/them in winter.

So I scoured the internet and found this little device called Underground Exterminator which, I thought then, was outrageously priced at around $16 plus shipping - for the little thing you get. Its a small pipe fitting - one end attaches to the car's exhaust pipe and the other attaches to your garden hose. I bought one anyway, given my desperation, though with a high dose of skepticism. After using Google checkout to get a $10 discount for first time buyers, it came to $13.

Now the results: I used it yesterday afternoon. The device wouldn't fit snugly on the pipe, but there's a screw which you can tighten to make it fit snugly. Just left some space for water and small amount of gas to escape to avoid back pressure so that my car's engine doesn't get damaged. I had to buy a 100ft garden hose (don't buy a drip hose - get a regular one) to reach my backyard from my driveway for another $25. Attached the garden hose, took it to a hole, and made sure there were no bends along the pipe. All the other holes were already well sealed because the ground had frozen the precious night. But I checked anyway. Then I opened one hole that I knew was most recently active, inserted the hose and sealed the hole with wet mud around the pipe.

I set the parking breaks and started the car and let it idle for about 45 minutes, more than the 30 minutes recommended as my yard has lot of tunnels and I wanted to be really sure I got him. Stayed within sight of the car to make sure it doesn't get overheated or things don't go wrong (don't sit inside the car or try smelling the fumes). Then I shut off the engine, took out the hose, and left the hole open. Also opened a couple of other neighboring holes and destroyed the other mounds, so I know if new ones pop up. You can open them all if you have the time.

24 hours later - there are NO MORE NEW HOLES FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 2 months. I am not declaring victory yet - will wait and see for a few more days. But if this really works as advertised then whoever invented this thing is a genius. Wish I had known about this earlier - it would have saved me $150 and huge amount of time on all the other useless solutions around.

Good luck to you all - happy mole hunting :-)
- Kartik

Here is a link that might be useful: Underground Exterminator http://www.undergroundexterm.com