How Often Should You Get Professional Pest Control Treatments?

Posted on: 5 June 2017

After you buy a new home, you want to protect it from damage so your investment grows. One thing you'll want to consider is pest control. By keeping destructive pests out of your home, you can prevent damage from chewing, urine, droppings, and destruction. Keeping pests away is just as important as getting rid of them when you have an infestation. A good practice is to have regularly scheduled treatments applied. Here's a look at how often you may need visits from a pest control company to keep bugs under control.

Consider Your Home's Location

If you live in a cold northern climate, you may have to battle rodents trying to keep warm in the winter, but you shouldn't have too many problems with bugs except for the summer months. Compare that to living in a warm and humid climate when bugs are crawling through your home every season of the year. If you have bugs active in your area all year, then you'll need to have pesticide applied more frequently. Also, if you live in the woods where bugs are plentiful, then you're more likely to need treatments more often.

Factor In Your Current Infestation

When you call a pest control company for an initial visit, the first thing they do is inspect your home. They might find carpenter ants under your bathroom vanity or roaches behind your refrigerator. If you already have bugs, you may need treatments closer together than you would if your home is bug-free and you're getting treatments for prevention only.

Follow Recommendations For Pesticide Application

Another thing that determines how often you need to have treatments is the length of time the pesticides being used can ward off bugs. As long as the chemicals are still strong enough to kill or repel bugs, they don't need to be reapplied. You just don't want to let the pesticides wear off or the bugs may multiply before your next visit from the exterminator.

Think About How Often You Want Inspections

Besides applying pesticides, the exterminator also checks for signs of infestations, including those from specialty insects. Insects like termites and bed bugs might not respond to the pesticides used for killing roaches, spiders, and ants. Since specialty bugs are not as common as roaches and ants, your pest control professional will probably just monitor your property for them and apply treatments if they are found to be active. If termites or bed bugs are rampant in your area, then frequent monitoring will help you end an infestation before it gets out of hand.

After considering these factors, your pest control company will recommend a treatment schedule. Common schedules are every 2-3 months throughout the year. More often than that is probably wasting your money and less often than that could make your treatment protocol less effective since bugs have a chance to multiply between visits.

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