General pest control in Sydney
General pest treatment for Sydney homes and businesses
One visit covering the pests that live in a Sydney house: ants, cockroaches, spiders, fleas, silverfish, rats and mice. Each one is treated where it actually lives, which is why the method changes from pest to pest.
Licensed and insured. Same day service.
The pests
Six pests, six different methods
Ants
A spray on the trail kills the ants you can see and tells the rest to route around it. A bait they carry home is what reaches the nest, so the trail is left alone while it does.
Cockroaches
German cockroaches live in the warm gaps of a kitchen: the kickboard, the motor housing behind the fridge, a cupboard hinge. Gel goes into those gaps, and wiping it off is what stops it working.
Spiders
Old webs come down first, because a spider sitting in an untouched web never has to cross the surface that was treated. Then the eaves, window reveals, fence lines and garage get a residual band.
Fleas
The adults on the animal are the vet's job. The eggs and larvae in the carpet, the skirting gap and the pet bed are ours, and they hatch in waves, which is why one pass rarely ends it.
Silverfish
They want dark, still and slightly damp: linen cupboards, the back of a wardrobe, a bookshelf against an external wall. Treating the room does nothing if the cupboard is not opened.
Rats and mice
Trapping and baiting clear what is already inside. Proofing is the part that lasts: a mouse is through a gap the width of a pencil and a rat through one the width of your thumb.
Two pest jobs sit outside a general treatment and are booked on their own.
Finding where they live is most of the job
First
Work out what it actually is
The treatment changes with the species, so identification comes before anything else. A black house ant and a coastal brown ant take different baits. A German cockroach breeds in the kitchen and stays there, while a big American cockroach has usually come up a drain from outside and is a different job again. Guessing at this step is how a treatment fails.
Then
Follow it back to the harbourage
What you see is the foraging edge, not the colony. The trail gets followed back to a wall cavity, a subfloor, a roof void, a garden bed against the house or the warm gap behind a kickboard. That is the target. Treating the bench where you saw them is treating the symptom.
Then
Bait where they carry, band where they walk
A bait is taken home and shared, which is what reaches a nest nobody can get at. A residual band is a line they have to cross. The two cancel each other out in the wrong order, because a repellent laid over a bait means nothing goes near the bait again.
Same visit
Close the way in
Weep holes, the gap under a roller door, a torn flyscreen, a perished door seal, a vent with no mesh, a branch touching the roof. For rodents this is the part that outlasts the bait. Everything else is buying time.
The first week
Leave it alone
Do not wipe the treated edges, do not mop the skirting line, and do not spray a supermarket product over the top. The residual band and the gel both have to stay exactly where they were put. A mop through the kitchen edge on day two costs you the treatment.
Two to three weeks
Judge it then
A bait works through a colony over days, and eggs already laid still hatch, so activity tails off rather than stopping on the day. By the third week you should be seeing next to nothing. If you are not, tell us what you are seeing and where you are seeing it.
Crawling insects, spiders and rodents are three different jobs
One visit can cover all three. They are set out apart because what goes down, and what you have to do afterwards, is not the same.
Ants, cockroaches, silverfish and fleas. None of them live out in the open, so the work goes into kickboards, hinges, cupboard corners, skirting lines, carpet edges and the warm cavity behind an appliance.
Preparation. Benches and the sink clear, pet bowls and pet bedding up, and the floors vacuumed. The vacuuming matters most for fleas, because the vibration brings the pupae out of their casings into the treatment rather than a fortnight later.
How it goes down. Gel and bait into the harbourage, a residual band along the edges they cross, and the outside perimeter treated so the next lot does not simply walk in behind them.
What ruins it. Wiping or mopping the treated edges in the first week, and spraying a supermarket product over the top of a bait. Either one leaves you with the cost and none of the result.
Local conditions
What a Sydney property adds to a general treatment
Humidity sets the calendar
Cockroach and ant activity climbs with the heat and the humidity from about November and peaks through the stickiest part of summer. A house that was quiet all winter is not pest free, it is cold.
A downpour pushes them inside
Heavy rain floods subfloors, drains and garden beds, and what was living out there is in the kitchen the same night. A spike after a wet week is the weather, not a failed treatment.
Weep holes cannot be filled
The open vertical joints in a brick skin are there to drain the cavity behind it, so blocking them causes damp. They can be meshed instead, which closes a favourite rodent and cockroach route without stopping the drainage.
Brick piers and a subfloor
An older Sydney house sits over a ventilated subfloor that rodents, spiders and cockroaches treat as a front room. Clearance under the bearers and mesh over the vents matter as much as anything applied inside.
Risers connect a unit block
Cockroaches move between flats through the plumbing and electrical risers, which is why a single treated unit in an untreated stack holds the line rather than ending it.
The bushland edge in autumn
Properties backing onto bush or a reserve get a rodent push indoors as the nights cool and the ground dries off. It is seasonal and predictable, and it is the right time to have the proofing looked at.
General pest control questions
The ones that come up before a first general treatment.
Get your general pest quote
Say what you have found and where, how long it has been going on, and whether there are pets or small children in the house. If you have already sprayed something yourself, say so, because it changes what will work.