Do Bat Boxes Work?

A bat box or bat house provides housing for bats. Conservation organizations promote them as a way to help and sustain bat populations, as well as a way to control insect populations. Texas Heritage for Living even went so far as to claim every backyard should have a bat box. 

They can also help you keep bats out of your home. You provide the bats with a safe place of their own. However, they aren't a foolproof solution and won't encourage bats to move out of your attic if they're already there.

What to Do Before You Set Up Your Box

We recommend calling us to conduct a home inspection before setting up your bat box. Why? Because if you're going to invite bats to hang around in your yard, you want to make sure you've excluded them from your home. 

Remember, bats can fit through holes as narrow as ⅝ of an inch, so you're not necessarily going to spot and caulk all those holes on a casual inspection. 

By allowing us to perform some preliminary exclusion, you increase your chances of keeping the bats out of your home even as you're helping them. 

Where to Set Up Your Bat House

You can buy commercial bat houses or make your own, but location matters. You can't attach them to trees, for example, because the branches create flight obstacles for the bats and offer bat predators such as owls a nice place to perch and catch them.

You'll want to raise them roughly 15 feet off the ground in an area that gets a lot of sun and has a water source nearby. We recommend securing them to tall poles rather than placing them in the eaves of your building, as you don't want them noticing small holes in your roof and getting bright ideas about other places where they might like to live.

Amazon allows you to purchase a telescoping bat box pole (and bat boxes themselves), as do many other retail stores.

Get Help Today

If bats work their way into your home despite your efforts to provide them with some housing of their own, don't fret. It's important to take care of the problem immediately to prevent damage and disease from bat guano, but you can rest assured that your bat box probably didn't cause the problem. We have so many bats in Houston that it's futile to chase them out of your yard completely.

Contact our team to gently pull those bat families from your attic and then exclude them from further entry so they stay in your yard where they belong.