Pest Exclusion Materials Estimator

Walk the structure, count the defects, and this turns the tally into a four-line shopping list. Each line rounds up to a whole purchasable unit and a waste buffer is added before rounding.

caulk:
  ft/tube = tube volume (in³) ÷ (bead width × bead depth, in²) ÷ 12
          = 27 ÷ (0.25 × 0.25) = 432 in = 36 ft/tube
  feet    = gap feet × (1 + waste %)
  tubes   = ceil(feet ÷ ft/tube)

copper mesh:
  feet  = penetrations × feet-per-penetration   (≈ 1 ft, an estimate)
  feet  = feet × (1 + waste %)
  rolls = ceil(feet ÷ roll length)              (20 / 100 / 400 ft, uncited defaults)

hardware cloth:
  sq ft = openings × avg opening area           (or width × height)
  sq ft = sq ft × (1 + overlap %)
  mesh  = mice → 1/4"   ·   rats → 1/2"          (a hard rule, not a choice)

door sweeps:
  sweeps = exterior door count                  (1 per door)
  line   = gap ≤ 1.0" Low-Profile · ≤ 1.25" Standard · ≤ 1.75" Versa-Line
           (uncited default bands: check the sweep's rated gap)

Mice can get through openings as small as 1/4" and rats through openings as small as 1/2", so 1/4" hardware cloth is the minimum that excludes mice and 1/2" is the rat minimum. Half-inch cloth will not stop mice, and the tool will not recommend it for them. Openings under about 2" (an uncited default; check the mesh packaging) pack with copper mesh; anything larger should be rebuilt with hard material rather than packed.

Sources, rechecked on 17 October 2026. The mouse and rat mesh rule follows the Reduce Pest Intrusion guide from the Building America Solution Center at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The Solution Center page first cited here and three other pages once cited (a caulk coverage calculator, a copper mesh product page and a door sweep product page) now return page not found, so they were dropped rather than replaced from memory. The 27 in³ tube volume, the 20, 100 and 400 ft roll lengths, the 2" packing cut-off and the door-sweep gap bands were credited to those pages and are now uncited defaults: check each against the packaging of the product you buy. The caulk line itself is unit arithmetic: cubic inches divided by square inches gives inches of bead, and 12 inches make a foot.

Two jobs downstream of the same walk have takeoffs of their own. Where the exclusion runs into a crawl space that needs lining rather than screening, the crawl space vapor barrier material calculator turns the same measurements into liner square footage, whole rolls, seam tape, fasteners and pier wraps. What that work is worth is a separate question, built from your own rates by the crawl space encapsulation pricing calculator. For the rodent job the exclusion belongs to, the rodent control and exclusion pricing calculator prices the initial service, the exclusion labor and the follow-ups together. Bird work is exclusion too, but it runs on netting, spikes and ledge geometry rather than mesh and sweeps, and the bird control pricing and materials calculator handles that takeoff and its price together.