A large number of the people that call us regarding their newly discovered roach problem mention how clean their house is. They don’t understand where all these roaches came from or why they would bother with such an immaculate house.
We spend the next few minutes educating and explaining the behavior and habits of cockroaches, but it could also be summed up in one simple statement.
THEY. DON’T. CARE!
We understand how much time and effort you put in to keeping your house clean and orderly. We appreciate that you vacuum, mop your floors and dust your surfaces at least twice a week. We admire that, but roaches simply don’t care if you did all that every single day.
They are looking for three things: food, water and shelter.
Most of us water our yards on a regular basis. We blast our sprinklers for 20 minutes a day and turn on our drippers around the plans and bushes. That’s the equivalent to the Ritz-Carlton posting a “Free Room and Board” sign all year long. We make our yards as the Promised Land to not just roaches, but spiders, scorpions, and every other insect. Pretty soon they push up against the foundation of the home. In soon time they’ve penetrated into the exterior walls of the house, and eventually spill over into the hallways of the house in plain sight.
They are specifically looking for last night’s left-overs. Roaches don’t don’t need that much food. If needs be, they can scrape any food residue off any single fingerprint they come across. They aren’t looking for a seven-course meal. There are enough unseen food sources in and around your house, they don’t have to look very far.
The interior of your walls provide the perfect place for any roach to set up camp and stay a while – a long while. They would rather not see you anyways, so hidden away in a crevice where there is no human disturbance is ideal. That’s the penthouse to them.
Some of our customers have houses that can nearly be mistaken for museums. They are perfetly spotless, but have substantial roach problems. It’s not any doing, un undoing, of their own, other than the fact that they built the house in the first place.
If you plan on hiring a pest professional to tackle the problem for you, they should be attacking the problem at the same source the roaches themselves are searching for – the water. Applying the proper chemicals at the moisture points of the yard is the first step in eradicating roaches from the property. They will keep coming, but the idea is to set up a well-placed barrier, and then maintain it.
If you have a roach problem there are only two ways to completely solve it. One, burn your house down. That’s probably not an option, so the only other thing you can do is hire a pest professional. That’s sounds more logical, right?