A friend proposed this rather strange idea. I was unable to decide whether or not it was feasible, so I present it to the SDMB for consideration:
Suppose your house has a pest problem: mice, termites, cockroaches - whatever. You call the professionals but don’t like their prices or their chemicals. So you rent a couple of large CO[sub]2[/sub] cylinders and place them in the basement. You seal up the house as best you can, crack the valves to create a slow & steady flow of CO[sub]2[/sub], then depart for the weekend. When you return (or so goes the theory), no living pests remain within the house, as the CO[sub]2[/sub] caused the oxygen level to be insufficient for life.
Houses aren’t sealed enough for that. You would need a massive amount of CO2 and deliver rapidly. I used to volunteer to do the CO2 chamber for rats in grad school. It works but it takes a few minutes but the chamber is tightly sealed and there is a large CO2 flow in a small space. Carbon monoxide would probably work better but that stuff is very dangerous. Roaches are durable and can easilly hide in places that normal gases won’t affect them.
More importantly roaches are pretty much immune to suffocation. You need to subject a cockroach to a pure CO2 atmosphere at high temperatures for over 12 hours to have any chance at all of killing it, and even then it will usually take a week to die of latent effects.
A weekend in a leaky house with a couple of CO2 cylinders wouldn’t even phase them.
What shagnasy said…The problem is that the bugs/mice whatever are finding their way in through holes you don’t know about. They’ll just leave and come back. If all exterminators did was kill the bugs, there’d be no reason for their services.