I’ve read the posts about killing cockroaches with the Boarx mixture and have followed the advice given. In the meantime, is there anything besides RAID that kills them quickly and can be sprayed on them from a distance?
topical application of isoprene polymers seems to be very effective. Its distance application requires some markmanship on your part, though.
Very funny.
I’m also interested in something I could spray on the little bastards to quickly kill them, and that wouldn’t leave toxic residue. I often see them in the kitchen, in hard to reach places. Squishing them can be difficult and messy.
too funny! 
Wasp spray, in my experience will drop the little guys instantly. The kind that shoots 12 feet.
Takes some marksmanship and leaves big splotches of bug killer on your walls and floor, though. Messy stuff.
When I was in college, we had a protocol to anti-roach an apartment.
- Stuff any entry points (around pipes, etc) with steel wool and duct tape in place.
- Roach Pruff (commercial borax mixture) behind everything you can, inside cupboards, etc.
- No food left out.
- No open water (other than the toilet - it’s too slippery for them to climb)
- Bug bomb three times, two weeks apart.
- The answer to “Paper or plastic” is always “Plastic”.
The water thing is because roaches need lots of water. They’re tropical. If you keep them from water, they’ll dehydrate.
The bug bomb is because you kill the live ones and then have to kill the next couple generations of bugs that are either larvae or eggs in your carpet as they mature.
Paper vs. Plastic is because the roaches love to lay eggs in the paper bag bundles that supermarkets stock in their back rooms.
Diatomaceous Earth is an abrasive powder made from the skeletons of microscopic creatures. When an insect walks through it, the powder gets into the joints of its little legs. The joints bind up, and the victim starves.
It’s non-toxic. If you or your pets accidentally eat some, it’s harmless to you.
If you stomp a roach, check your shoe. Those tiny red specks on some roaches are eggs, and you don’t want to track them around.
Cockroaches are scary to many folks, because they’re quick, and they seem to be fearless. Don’t let their tattoos and their tiny leather jackets freak you out. They’re only bugs. Those itsy bitsy switchblades are just for show; they can’t hurt you. May the shoe be with you.
If they’re far enough from an open flame, say in your sink, they can be killed with Ronsonol lighter fluid. My theory is that it’s lighter than water and so they are less able to resist breathing it in. It seems to drown them.
Canned air, the kind I use to clean inside computers. It will freeze them in their tracks, and leaves no residue when the frost evaporates.
Wow, a whole new use for diatomaceous earth. And here I thought the stuff was only good as a bulking agent in filtering.
As is probably obvious, I have no idea where you get this stuff besides a place like Aldrich. Is it possible to walk into a place like Home Depot and ask for the aisle with the diatomaceous earth? And do they sell it under the name Celite if so?
Eight years (and counting!) in a supermarket 40+ hours a week and I have never seen a roach nor its offspring in or around my paper bags. You should say no to paper bags because they’re annoying and expensive, not because they harbor roaches at the store.
If I have shaving cream with high pressure in the can, I just restrain them with shaving cream and then smash them with a blunt object.
Usually clean it all up afterwards with a single paper towel.
No kidding? What is it about shaving cream that stops them? I can spray the beasts point blank with Raid and they keep moving around. Of course, there’s no way in hell I’d ever be able to smoosh one . . .
The weight, actually.
Doesn’t stop 'em, but it slows 'em down for a second while they try to work their way out of it.
I just wish I could get dispensers with greater range.
My favorite method is to hit them with oven cleaner. Sure, it doesn’t kill them fast, and sure, you have a hard time breathing afterward, but dissolving them with lye is just so fun!
I decapitated one two mornings ago. Didn’t mean to. I saw it climbing along the wall so I grabbed a knife nearby just to stab it. I brought the blade down quickly and ended up taking off its head. I then became morbidly entranced at the sight of the body still clinging to the wall but steadily losing its grip as the limbs slowly died. That took about 3 minutes. Creepy.
I’m wondering if the original question was about boric acid rather than Borax. Years ago, when I moved to New York, I couldn’t figure out why pharmacies had such a wide selection of boric acid on their shelves – could there be some odd eye problem plaguing Big Apple residents?
A co-worker told me the stuff is a terrific non-toxic roach killer. As indicated in one of the other comments, the stuff gets in the bugs’ joints and the little bastards suffocate or somesuch. Sure enough, I soon began having roach problems and, sure enough, the stuff worked – I spread it around my baseboards and within a few days, no roaches (it was a pain in the neck to vacuum, however).
For those looking for a more natural approach, I recommend house gheckos. A similar infestation in an apartment in Minneapolis (I was a broke graduate student living in a hovel) was quickly nipped in the bud by Larry and Larry (I could never tell the two apart). The gheckos were cheap, quiet and I never saw any ghecko turds (not that I’d know what a ghecko turd looks like.
I once did this with a pen. Tried to hit a roach and decapitated it. The body ran around for five minutes.
I buy diatomaceous earth at AutoZone, where it’s sold to clean up spilled oil.
Screw that. When I had roaches, I spent two years buying borax, diatomaceous earth, even a cat and a ferret. The cat would occasionally play with a roach, the ferret ran away from them. My place was disgustingly overrun. I mean, really bold horrid roaches who would hang out during daylight hours and laugh at me.
Finally one of my neighbors, a professional exterminator, gave me a couple tubes of Maxforce he had on hand. About 20 minutes to apply it in little two inch strips in the corner of the baseboards. In less than a week, I was totally roach free. I don’t know if there were still roaches in the other units in the apartment building, but my unit was done, and in three years, they never came back.
A couple of years later my workplace got them, and THEY spent a fruitless year on borax and other fuzzy feel-good stuff that did nothing. I ordered the Maxforce online and that was the end of that. By the way, you don’t need the fancy exterminator pump to dispense the tube - a Magic Marker will serve quite nicely as the plunger. Again, three or four years later, still no return of the roaches.
And the active ingredient in this stuff is the same thing in Frontline flea treatment for dogs and cats, so while I wouldn’t let them chew on a tube, it’s not terribly toxic to them in small amounts if they somehow manage to get their schnozzles in a strip (but because of where you apply it, it’s highly unlikely they could get to it anyway.)
Am I alone in that I’ve never even seen a cockroach…not even a dead one