About Sonic Technology

As university graduates in the early 1960s, the founders of Sonic Technology followed the corporate career paths that the era demanded. 

The `60s also shaped our values, world perspectives and environmental views. We were well-schooled by our corporate employers but, like many of our peers, wanted to make an impact on our world.

Sonic Technology Products, Inc. was founded in 1981 as a research based company dedicated to exploring non-toxic earth and people-friendly methods of pest control. Since our first production facility was in Palo Alto, in the middle of
 Silicon Valley, our company gravitated toward possible electronic approaches to pest control problems.

 We found that high frequency sound (ultrasound) could be used as a behavior modification technique to cause some common pest species to be repelled from  an area where the sound was present. The principally affected pest type was the rodent: rats and mice.

 In fact, rodents happen to present the single largest pest problem worldwide.
 Rodents bite tens of thousands of people every year; they 
can carry numerous deadly diseases; they cause thousands of structure fires by eating the insulation on electrical wiring and their consumption of grain products worldwide causes hundreds of thousands of deaths due to starvation annually.

 The existing conventional methods of rodent control consisted of a variety of  traps and poisons which very often cruelly kill the target animal. On top of that, killing rodents never really solves the problem long-term; new intruders almost
 always replace the old. Repelling rodents with non-toxic, non-lethal sound represented a challenge and an opportunity that matched our mindset.
 The results of our biological and engineering research produced the PestChaser® Ultrasonic Pest Repeller, which we introduced at the National Hardware Show in

The one thing that none of our competitors have been willing to imitate is Sonic's lead in representing this type of product for what it is: a rodent repeller. Some seemed to believe that enticing claims to get rid of all manner of insects and BIG
coverage areas were the road to market-share Nirvana.

 After millions and millions of PestChaser sales worldwide one thing we know is that for every person that P.T. Barnum was right about ("there's a sucker born every minute") there are fifty born who know that "if it sounds too good to be true, it is".
 

  
 
Commercial Applications Techniques and Theory

                      
The commercial application for ultrasonic rodent repellers is extremely diverse. Virtually any business which experiences on-going rodent problems can potentially benefit from incorporating this technique into its rodent management program.

Conventional traps of all types and toxic baits serve only one purpose; to kill the existing target  species. Killing the rodents may be satisfying but it cannot cure the problem long term as anyone involved in facilities maintenance well knows. There are always more rodents outside waiting to come in to replace the population killed. 

The cycle is endless because the "carrying capacity" of
the space has not been altered. Carrying capacity is the ability of a given space to support a given number of rodents with food, shelter and water.

Rodents will maintain the optimum carrying capacity of a space by killing young and reducing breeding cycles if the population gets too high and aggressive males prevent the incursion of new outsiders. Similarly, when the population is decimated by trapping or baiting, the remaining animals
will increase breeding cycles and new outsiders will be allowed to come in. This is simple survival of the species biological response. Rodents are at the bottom of the food chain; everything eats them, so they are well adapted to survive.One survival adaptation that they possess is the ability to communicate in a range of sound that their predators cannot perceive.

That range is ultrasonic. Rodents have the ability to emit and
receive sound from 20,000 cycles per second (20Khz) to 90,000 cycles per second (90Khz).
                 
This ability is precisely what gives we humans the opportunity to alter the environment of the space to make it inhospitable for rodents and therefore break the reinfestation cycle.

The PestChaser® rodent repeller introduces into a given unobstructed space complex and intense ultrasonic sound in the 30-60Khz range. The level of noise in the ultrasonic range creates auditorystress which can be disorienting and even painful.
A disoriented rodent is a rodent vulnerable to predators and that is not acceptable as a survival strategy. The net result is that that particular space will no longer sustain a rodent population and your rodent management program makes real
 strides forward.

This technique is not magic, it simply capitalizes on biological responses known to exist.