I’ve had a veritable wave of pests in my house recently and found myself learning plenty from attending the school of hard knocks. To wit:
- Don’t ever use rat poison in your house. The rat eats it and dies in your walls. Your house smells like death for the next 2 months.
- Avoid any pest control product that uses the words “kills on contact” or “barrier”. Killing on contact means you aren’t killing the nest but just killing the unlucky few that were around you at the time. A barrier just means the pest goes another route.
- The pest control aisle at Lowes is near useless: the products are usually the cheap contact/barrier kind that you don’t want and quite often the products are not labeled with the species they target: I have carpenter ants and they are not targeted by most ant killing products. I did my research online and bought from a website that actually taught me about my problem and how to solve it. Imagine that.
- A leaky sunroom is the source of the carpenter ants - they are nesting in the sunroom roof where there is water available due to the leaks. I’m not terribly happy with the quality of the sunroom - I definitely learned a few lessons there too.