Sunday, September 15, 2019

Termites and what to look for.

                                                                                         Brought to you by Proven Pest Control




Transcript

Hi Everyone,

Alex here just thought we'd cross over to live to a customer's premises.  Now we had a phone call couple of days from a very distraught customer, who had discovered termites on that property or termite damage.

Now they had another company come out around about three months ago to get rid of these termites, however they've now discovered that the termites having indeed moved to another part of the house and when we go in to look at the treatment done we could see why they've moved to another part of the house, so I'm going to show you some of the damage that's been done and what the customer noticed.

First of all when they came in and saw the termite damage so you can see here the damage or the mudding has done to be packed into the wall cavity there. Now that was once flush just like it is there and now the mudding’s pushed it out, the customer hadn't been out is he out here for about three or four months and this is the first time they'd actually seen this they will go around see if we can see inside the actual damaged area so you could see all this termite mudding.

Here now this is a storage cupboard underneath a set of stairs goes right up to the top there. The hot water system, was leaking down here which is one of the conducive, it's a conducive environment for termites the moisture is what drawn them to this little area here. You can see in there some mud shelter tubing happening in there.

The company that came out prior to us dusted this particular area and you can see you know you may not be able to see but in there they've packed in all this dust which is the incorrect way to actually treat the termites because you're just blocking up all the tubing there.

That's way too much dust; what they've done is they've tried to pump too much of the chemical into the into the tubes all at once instead of doing it over a period of two or three days. They’ve tried to do it in about 10 minutes and that's the wrong way to do things so all they've done is scare the termites off and they've moved into another part of the house.

What's happened is the termites themselves they've moved out of this little cupboard here and they've moved into the kitchen flooring in the subfloor now when they weren't there before so now not only do we need to treat that particular area under the kitchen subfloor,  but now we're going to have to do a full chemical barrier which should always be done as part of any treatment either a chemical barrier or a termite monitoring station setup.

That really depends on your soil, slope of the ground and certainly a few other more things like safety issues between doing a chemical barrier and your monitoring stations. Obviously if you're on earth on a steep slope you're not going to be able to do a chemical barrier because after chemical, first rain is just going to rush down that hill.  There have been cases where there's been a creek at the at the bottom of the hill and the chemical was actually runoff into that creek and the pest control operator has copped quite a nasty little fine from the EPA for poisoning waterways, so that's when we would consider using termite monitoring stations.

What I'm going to do now is I'm going to show you some of the conducive conditions that probably led to these termites entering the home particularly this this home and a few conducive conditions you might find throughout your property. So the first thing we notice is that the hot water system, it was obviously dripping against the wall here, the termites were attracted by the moisture and that's what's led them into the cupboard which is on the other side of that wall.

They've added a pipe here which still isn't good enough because it's not that far away from the slab itself all that moisture is just one big attractant to termites coupled with things like pieces of timber left on the ground all over the place. You've got quite a few trees here and shrubs but also, we've got leaking roofs which has led to timber rot.

 Timber in direct contact with the soil; these are all things that will attract termites. Termites don't know the difference between a tree and your house they have absolutely no idea difference between the difference of those two, so when you have things like garden beds up against your house, you are inviting them into your house.

It’s sort of leaving bread crumbs for them to follow from your house, so they might start here in the garden they'll come along the timber here and then they'll start to explore a little bit further out here. As you can see here we've got a leaking air conditioning unit which is dropping moisture straight in there, now on the other side of this wall is a large termite nest.

Some of those some of some things I used to do to explain it to the customers as simply as possible is that termite say your natural foragers in the bush, they find a dead or decaying trees and timber debris and they break it down scavenging those and breaking it down. In your home or in your garden, all your man-made objects, they don't know the difference between the two. You may have your landscaping timbers here they don't know that that's the landscaping too, but they think that's just a fallen tree branch so they're going to start attacking that.

Then they're going to scout a little bit further along and look for your moisture thinking that it's a creek, or it's sort of a mulch vegetation. Which they can then attack and then that obviously leads them into your garden beds and they come across your mulch, which to them is just bark and they're thinking: “well if there's bark around then there's a tree.”

They don't know the difference between a tree and your house so they'll get into your house and they'll start thinking, well this is the tree it's quite a bit of timber here let's set up camp here and that's when you start getting into problems.

It’s always important trying keep your gardens free of debris mulch and stuff even-even in that how its raised up here, you can see it's raised above the weep holes in too much it's just going to come straight through this straight through the soil here and enter the weep holes on the other side.

 Obviously all this sort of debris down here is no good, you're going to have timber here you probably kick this over and you'll find termites underneath. This is all attractants to them they don't know that this is all treated or painted Timbers they'll have a go at it anyway and if they don't like the taste of it they'll keep on searching and it's so close to the house they'll find your structural pine fairly easily.

 Also stuff like this makes it really hard for a pest controller to inspect your property or your property properly so when you do have an inspection or you just get your basic pest spray done make sure you're trying give us enough room so we can actually see down the side.  I mean we're not we're not supermen or anything which we don't have the x-ray vision or anything, you know it could possibly be Termites down there Redback spiders the whole lot.

 So if we're spraying either food yet your spiders or we're doing your termite inspections it's absolutely no way we're going to be able to see any sort of issues down this sort of area, so it's always good to keep this these sorts of areas clear.

 You can see up here you've got trees leading into the gutter in there no generally you won't probably get termites going up these little tiny branches and into you into your oozed it can happen but it's quite rare for that to happen but possums, rats, mice up climbing those trees and get straight into your gutters and into your roof voids.

 Again, more moisture obviously coming into summer you're going to have all your mosquitoes in there. Mosquitoes isn't something that we can really treat effectively, you could do just as a good of a job with stuff from Bunnings. So save yourself a bit of money if you're only concerned about mosquitoes, get rid of all that standing water and get some stuff from Bunnings and do it yourself.  

Really, it's not worth getting a pest controller out for just for mosquitoes everything else obviously yeah definitely spiders Redbacks, cockroaches, Termites always together get a qualified pest controller out to sort that out.

Now here's another issue, we've got leaking gutters. Again, during the winter, during the rain the gutters begin to leak create moisture down here in the garden beds and that's going to attract your Termites.


All this mulch it looks great, but all this is just attracting termites they just think that this is a tree bark that is falling down from it from a tree so they're going to figure it,  well there's a tree here somewhere we'll keep searching for it and next thing you know they're inside your house. Even in they've got the mulch built up above the of the weep hole to us is just going to go straight through there which they obviously have it's why we're here.
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1 comment:

  1. Timbers they'll have a go at it anyway and if they don't like the taste of it they'll keep on searching and it's so close to the house they'll find your structural pine fairly easily. Cockroach Control inRomford

    ReplyDelete