"I Was Paying $1,450 A Month For An Apartment I Couldn't Stand To Be In. Then A Small Device Plugged Into The Wall Gave It Back To Me."
Monday, June 22, 2026 — Philadelphia, PA
Tyler Nguyen, 27, worked from home. His one-bedroom in South Philly was his office, his gym, his everything. He'd spent two years making it exactly how he wanted clean, minimal, quiet. The kind of space where he could think clearly and get real work done.Then the scratching started.
It came from inside the wall directly behind his desk. At first it was only at night, around 11pm. He told himself it was the pipes. Old Philly buildings make sounds.
Then it started during his 9am calls. Then it was constant a dry, persistent scratching that burrowed into every quiet moment of his day. He started wearing headphones at his desk just to drown it out.
Then came the morning that changed everything.
He sat down at his desk with his coffee, opened his laptop, and looked at his keyboard.
"I work on that keyboard for ten hours a day. Something had been running across it while I slept. I cleaned it three times and still felt sick every time I sat down."
— Tyler Nguyen, 27 — Philadelphia, PA
He told his landlord immediately. His landlord sent a maintenance guy with two snap traps and a can of steel wool. Tyler set them up. The traps sat untouched. The scratching continued every night, directly inside the wall, completely unreachable.
He emailed his landlord again. Then again. Three weeks passed.
His landlord finally replied: it was a building-wide issue. They were "working on it."
Tyler stared at that email for a long time.
"I was paying $1,450 a month for an apartment I couldn't stand to be in. Because of something I could hear but couldn't see and couldn't reach."
— Tyler Nguyen— Brian Calloway
He stopped eating at his desk. Then he stopped working at his desk entirely. He started taking his laptop to coffee shops spending $8 on an oat milk latte he didn't want, just to sit somewhere the walls were quiet.
His productivity collapsed. His sleep collapsed. He started dreading going home at the end of the day. The apartment he'd carefully built into his ideal workspace had become the one place he didn't want to be.
He was two weeks into the coffee shop routine when his friend Marcus stopped by unannounced one Saturday. Tyler let him in, embarrassed by the state of the place the headphones on the desk, the laptop charger coiled up like it was ready to leave, the general feeling of a person who had quietly given up on a space.
Marcus asked what was going on. Tyler explained. Marcus listened to the wall for about ten seconds.
"Yeah," Marcus said. "I had this."
He went out to his car and came back holding a small white device. He walked straight to the outlet directly behind Tyler's desk the wall the scratching was coming from and plugged it in. Then he plugged the second unit into the bedroom outlet.
He stood up and said:
"Just leave it plugged in."
"In the wall?" Tyler said. "It reaches them inside the wall?"
"Electromagnetic pulses," Marcus said. "Goes right through. They can't stay. Give it 72 hours."
Tyler looked at the device in the outlet. It was smaller than his phone charger. No wires, no bait, no mechanism. Just sitting there.
He was skeptical. But he was also exhausted and $48 into oat milk lattes he didn't want, so he left it plugged in and went to bed.
That night: scratching at 11pm as usual. He put his headphones in.
The following night: quieter. He noticed it before he fell asleep and lay there waiting for it to get louder. It didn't.
Night three: he sat at his desk at 10:58pm and listened. The wall was completely silent.
He sat there for twenty minutes without his headphones. Just working. At his desk. In his apartment. In total quiet.
"I hadn't done that in over a month," Tyler said. "I just sat there working and it was quiet and I realized I was home again."
He turned the device over. Two words: PestLab™.
"Twenty-two years I waited for my own home. I wasn't about to let mice in the walls take it from me. PestLab™ solved in 72 hours what $1,100 worth of exterminator visits and a week of traps couldn't. I ordered units for every room the same morning the scratching stopped."
— Brian Calloway
"My landlord spent three weeks telling me it was a building-wide problem and they were 'working on it.' PestLab™ fixed it in 72 hours. I ordered two more units the same night the wall went quiet. I'm never working out of a coffee shop again."
— Tyler Nguyen
Traditional Methods
PestLab™
Snap traps — only catch visible mice
✓ Reaches colony inside the walls
Poison bait — mice die inside walls, smell for weeks
✓ Mice leave alive — nothing dies inside your home
$900–$1,100 exterminator visits
✓ One-time device, 4–5 year lifespan
Monthly return treatments required
✓ Continuous 24/7 protection, plug in once
Mice adapt to traps and return
✓ Variable frequency — mice can never adapt
Toxic chemicals unsafe for family
✓ Zero chemicals, safe for kids & most pets
RK
RACHEL KIM — MY REVIEW OF PESTLAB™
*The person's story described below is fictitious and was instead founded on experiences shared by PestLab™ customers.