Say Adios To La Cucaracha With These Tips From U.S. Pest- You’re a good housekeeper, but roaches have taken over your home. They’ve invaded your walls, your rooms and even your ceiling. No matter where you go, you find these insects feeding, multiplying and causing trouble.
Every solution will take time, but you can reclaim your home. Here are the most common reasons that roaches pick certain homes and what you can do to change their minds.
An extermination service can send technicians to treat your home approximately once a month until the roaches go away. This will not work effectively unless you make your home less friendly to the roach. The advantage to calling pest control is that a licensed exterminator has access to treatment that you don’t. These tested solutions will kill roaches and any other pests that dare to enter your home.
The best places to spray include:
- Cabinets (provided that you seal all of your food first)
- Sinks and bathtubs
- Entrances to your home
- Screened and open-air patios (especially near the door into your home)
- Any other place where you have seen roaches congregate
Look for the most common hangouts and your technician will spray these areas first. Be careful using chemicals around people and pets.
Keep food and water out of reach
Even if pest control pros are coming to your home tomorrow, you need to check the following things. Making your home environment less friendly to roaches will encourage the pests to take off and hopefully stay as far away from your home as possible. Like most other living things, roaches need food and water to survive. They’ll go to convenient sources before they’ll make serious efforts to find what they need. If you make food and water difficult enough to reach, they’ll look elsewhere.
Seal your containers
Put all of your food into sealed containers: preferably thick plastic, which roaches can’t penetrate. If you own a vacuum sealer (such as a Food Saver), use it to reseal bags of chips and other such foods. Also, because roaches also love cardboard, you should transfer boxed foods to plastic containers or bags. Go ahead and put all of your canned soft drinks into the refrigerator, box and all.
Get rid of the grease
Roaches also love grease. Use a household degreaser as soon as possible after you fry hamburgers or cook anything else that leaves an oily residue all over your kitchen. Cleaners with added orange oil cut through grease, as does hot water with a few drops of dish soap. You can also add a capful or two of white vinegar to the dish soap and water.
Home improvements
You’ll also need to eliminate water supplies. Fix leaking faucets. Pull the plug on the sink as soon as you finished washing dishes. Search your home for any other water source and eliminate or treat the problem.
Just add bleach
If you’re on well water, or if your city does not add enough chlorine to deter roaches, add a few drops of household bleach to any source of water. You can add a couple of drops per gallon of your pet’s water, but no more. Toilet tanks and other water supplies that aren’t for anybody’s consumption can have more. Roaches detest bleach and won’t often try to drink this water.
Try stuffing with steel wool
Steel wool in cracks and other openings discourages roaches. You can find balls of this highly-abrasive stuff at your local hardware store. The roaches hate crossing these things, so they will stay out of your space if all of their usual entrances are stuffed.
Set traps
Your library is another hot spot for roaches. They love book bindings, mostly for the glue. You can buy roach baits to put on the shelves: the roaches often go for these poisoned morsels instead of your precious fiction collection.
Another solution is to sprinkle boric acid around your bookshelves. If you have pets or small children, keep this powder well out of their reach.
Kill the electricity
Roaches love the electromagnetic field around your electronics. Unplug and store anything that you don’t use on a regular basis. This will give the roaches fewer reasons to hang out in your home and eliminate a little of the counter-top clutter at the same time.
Small appliances can be wrapped in plastic bags and thrown into the freezer for half an hour to forty-five minutes. This will kill the roaches that have worked their way into, say, your toaster.
Don’t be afraid to use the vacuum
Surprisingly, one of the best ways to eliminate roaches that you still see crawling around is to hook up your vacuum cleaner’s suction hose and go to work. You can suck up hundreds, if not thousands, of roaches with your vacuum. Before you begin, sprinkle boric acid in the bag or canister. This will kill most of the roaches shortly after you suck them up. An empty vacuum bag can go into a plastic bag and then to a remote trash dump. You can dump a canister into a plastic bag, too.
All of these solutions will take time to work. You might even see more roaches than usual at first. This isn’t because you’re doing something wrong: as you reduce food and water supplies, the pests will become more prevalent and bold. More will emerge in search of the now-lessened food supply, but be patient. You should see better results in a few weeks.
Do you have more questions? Feel free to contact us today for more information.