Homeowners who want to get rid of all the pests on their property should know how to see if any critters are living there in the first place, says pest control guru Fred Willey. As owner and president of Invader Pest Management, based in Glendale, Arizona, he provides here a checklist of what you need to do.
When we are putting together a checklist for customers to evaluate their property for pests, they should be aware of a few things. They include:
- Checking your water source. Are you watering too much or too little? Are any leaks on your property? You should be looking at your faucets to make sure they are all shut off tightly. Look at the timing settings on your sprinkling systems, and contact your landscape gardening center to see if you need to water their lawn for seven or 10 minutes a day.
- Look for any holes in structures or cracks or crevices when you walk around your house. If you find any, you should seal everything off, either with a screen, with silicone, or a patching compound.
- Make sure that your storage system will prevent pests from coming inside. Start in your garage. Cardboard boxes, for example, are notorious for harboring bugs, especially if these boxes are stored on top of concrete floors. The cardboard absorbs moisture so the cardboard will be damp, which will attract bugs. So store cardboard on top of a shelf, not on a concrete floor. Even better, store items in a plastic container with a tight lid, where you can see through to what is inside and be able to keep everything else out.
- Inside the house, do a deep cleaning – and do it regularly. When was the last time you pulled out the refrigerator and looked underneath it, or got all the lint out behind the washer and the dryer? When was the last time you pulled out the drawer in the bottom of the oven, and got underneath the stove? Or when did you look on the top of the stove? Did you know that the top will lift up, and you can get inside it to clean all the grease out there? On a regular basis, you should pull things out of closets, and vacuum along the base, cleaning out all the dirt in the corners. This is where we find a lot of spiders, dust mites, and other bugs. Deep cleaning will really help reduce some of the insect infestations due to sanitation issues.
These are some tactics that will lead you to having less of a pest problem. Do them on a quarterly basis or twice a year. Focusing on deep cleaning will make a huge improvement on reducing the number of pests in your home. And you don’t have to do it every week or month, just a couple of times a year for best results.
