Best do it yourself method of indoor pest control?

I am having a bit of a problem wit bugs this year, mainly ants and wolf spiders. My house is on a slab. I was looking at some of the products to control bugs, I saw some foggers and then some that are to spray on baseboards. Which would be best for me?

That depends on what type of ants. All ants are not created equal.

The first thing you can do is pretty much give up on controlling wolf spiders. It is almost impossible to get any residual control of spiders so all you can really do is kill the ones you can see. Unfortunately wolf spiders travel. You can kill them today and more will wander in tomorrow. But unless you also have a massive cockroach problem they will also wander out tomorrow. They don’t set up home in houses unless there is a lot of food for them. The best you can do is control the insects they feed on.

As for the ants, usually your best bet is to use a combination of surface spray and baits. The stuff that you spray on the base-boards is most likely a typical surface spray. Surface sprays are most effective at stopping ants from finding food, since it works to kill the foragers. Once they find food so many ants will arrive that the chemical will be worn away within an hours or so and become useless.

So the trick is to use a surface spray with baits. That way the ant populations are kept low enough for the surface spray to work. You can buy commercial ant baits but it is just as effective to make your own: 3 parts sugar to one part borax dissolved in the minimum amount of boiling water. The commercial baits are almost all just sugar and borax anyway. The only thing with baits is you need to keep re-applying them whenever you notice the ant numbers building up.

And good hygiene is also important. Wash dishes regularly, empty the bin regularly, vacuum at least once a week. Basically everything that will remove food sources. No food, no ants.

Dunno about the spiders but for ants (I have lots of problems with them as well), things I do include:

  1. Clean up. Don’t leave food and water lying around. If you find a little trail of ants make sure to scrub it hard after you kill them, to clean up their little scent markings that tell their buddies “Food Here!”.

  2. Find out the paths they are using to get inside and seal those up.

  3. If the path leads outside, pour a potful of boiling soapy water right down. Won’t get them all but it gets a lot.

  4. Grants Ant baits seem to do the trick but they take a while (ants take the poison and bring it back home, eventually kills the colony).

  5. Inside I favor diatamaceous earth (you can find it at the hardware store and the nursery - get the stuff meant for pests, not the stuff used for swimming pools) because it’s pretty safe around people and pets. If you find them coming in under a baseboard, for example, dust some along the cracks (just use a cheap bristle paintbrush). Ants crawl into it, the tiny particles act like a forest of razor blades which cut open their exoskeleton and they bleed to death (dehydrate anyhow). It’s not consumed so even a big wave of ants will just keep dying and dying.

I will just add my standard note when I see the word “borax,” which is do not confuse this with the brand name Boraxo, which is a hand soap. Borax is usually sold near the laundry detergent as a detergent booster.

For ants I mix Boric Acid with orange juice, and put it in shallow containers like gallon milk-bottle lids. Then I put those containers in the corners of my kitchen. Kills ants good.

But the big thing is to not have food/crumbs/drips anywhere in your kitchen. Not on the counters, not in the sink, not on the stove, not on the floor.

(bolding mine)

Ruthless. Totally fucking ruthless. That’s outstanding. :smiley:

Yes, but certain types of diatomaceous earth (containing lots of crystalline silica) can be hazardous to inhale, largely because of those tiny, razor-like particles. So wear a dust mask if you’re using the stuff.

My understanding is that the stuff used for insect control is fairly safe - it’s a fine powder so I wouldn’t fog the air with it, but if you just brush it down along the baseboards I don’t think that there’s any problem. The kind that is used for pool filters is heat-treated which results in more of the crystalline silica that you mention, that’s the stuff to avoid. I got a big box at my local Ace in the gardening section, sold specifically for antibug use.

Some links:

http://www.hydromall.com/happy_grower16.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatomaceous_earth#Safety_considerations
http://www.biconet.com/crawlers/DE.html

All that being said I still wash my hands afterwards and if I’m working in a tight space I’ll wear gloves and sometimes even a mask.

My old house had spider problems. The front porch was like something out of a horror movie with huge scary spiders and their giant man-catching webs. So I set out on the internet one night to find a cure. I came across something called the Spider Elimination Kit for $75. Riiighht… I thought to myself. But was desparate and tried it anyway. The main pesticide is called Suspend SC, and boy is this good stuff.

Spiders on the front porch? Dead. Any curious bug that landed on the front porch? Also dead. I recommended it to my Mom who had a typical Floridian roach/spider issue. She sprayed her house with it (inside and out). No more problem.
Do a little research to ensure that this product would be safe to use for your home (pets, kids, whatnot). If you have the funds for it, this stuff might be what you need, and although pricey, is cheaper that having pest control come out.
Suspend SC

Just adding that my experiences with Borax have been pretty good. It can be messy if you overapply it (and it’s hard not to be enthusiastic about pest control), but it worked for me at least as well as household poison sprays, and it’s a lot less scary.

Sailboat

My grandmother lived in a small town in the mid-west. She bought “Hoo-Doo” paper at the grocery store.
Although she kept a lot of sugar in a metal drum with a loose lid you couldn’t find an ant in the house, let alone the pantry!

We have had problems with various creepy, crawly critters, insects in our house. Most were in the basement and some eventually working their way upstairs.
I picked up a number of different sizes of sticky strips and put them on the floor in the basement, in particular in corners and wherever they might be making their entrance.
They have proven very successful, though initially my cat kept bringing them upstairs attached to various parts of her body. The best one so far is about 3 by 5 inches. I put double sided sticky tape on the back to keep the edges flush with the floor just to make it easier for the little buggers to crawl onto the strips.
After several months some were covered with just about every kind of insect imaginable, so they’ve been replaced with new ones.
The big catch happened the other day when my cat showed an unusual amount of curiosity with one of the strips. Here was a mouse stuck to it! She got to play with him for a bit before I released him outside.
The nice thing about these strips is that there are no health concerns, no spray, no liquids.

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