I moved into an apartment that is infested with large shinny dark brown roaches .They are over an inch long and come out when the lights are off and run across the floor at record speed. boiling water does slow them down. I’m getting out of here as fast as possible but have not found a new home yet. I’m living under siege as far as I’m concerned this is a nightmare. I’m allergic to all pesticides. And I have neighbors.There are three other apartments in this building.
Well until I move I’m living with everything that will fit in large plastic bags and I will have to unpack all belongings and re pack them to insure that nothing goes with me.
I have read about the use of boric acid I don’t want to poison myself can someone please tell me is there a likely hood of me having a reaction ?
Boric acid is generally considered safe for humans so long as it is not ingested. It is commonly used medicinally in certain external applications, e.g. eyewash. I have no way of knowing how likely it might be that you specifically would have a reaction, but for humans in general the likelihood seems extremely low.
What does that mean? I find it incredibly unlikely that you are allergic to all pesticides since that would also entail being allergic to all plants, all plastics, all cosmetics and and all soaps and detergents.
If you can be a little more specific about what you are allergic to it would be useful. If you are allergic to a specific class of insecticide then there are countless others, including as the borax acid already mentioned. If you are allergic to the organic solvents used in many pesticide there are countless formulations that are free of all solvents.
My friend moved into an apartment with a similar issue. She expensively vacated that place to move into a new place with the same problem. She’s freaked out and unable to sleep in the place. It’s hellish. The problem is that so many people are nonchalant about this issue and if you have neighbors that don’t care you can never fix the issue. I’m beginning to learn just how many people seem to be willing to live with that type of problem. The biggest issue as a renter is the simple fact that all your efforts to solve the problem will probably be useless so long as you have a neighbor and a property manager with untreated common areas/basements.
Here is Cecil’s column about killing roaches and using Borax.
I don’t have much constructive to add other than my sympathy. I took a lot of time to apply expanding foam all over her apartment to seal the nooks and crannies I could find and she’s applied a commercial boric acid based poison along the walls and around the kitchen. So far it’s been a month and she’s not bought any food and they have popped up in the bathroom drains seeking water.
The whole situation has scared me away from ever considering leaving my roach-free apartment. There’s just no way to properly evaluate if you are moving into a place with an issue or not.
I know you want to flee the place you are in now but I’m not optimistic about that working out too well. First landlords are generally scumbags and have absolutely no interest in breaking leases. You essentially have no rights in the situation without a long drawn out process of documenting the landlords lack of response. And if he responds in a half-assed manner you’re pretty much screwed since you have no legal standing to break the lease. Then, even if you do leave you’ll never know if the new place you find will have a similar problem. I used to think they were fairly rare in well kept places, being that I’ve never personally had a problem and neither had any of my immediate friends but this recent experience has convinced me that all multi-unit buildings are infested to some degree. The fact that you are in a small complex, sounds like a 2 or 3 flat, it might be more practical to talk to your neighbors and landlord and see if a systemic treatment is a better solution than moving into a new potential problem elsewhere. If the neighbors are filthy careless folks…then I’d bail.
Boric Acid DOES work but it takes time. Basically the roaches walk over it and gets on them, then they go back to the nest and transfer it to the others. It doesn’t kill them on the spot, which is what freaks a lot of people out. You’re gonna have to put up with them for a few weeks to allow them to run over the boric acid and bring it back home
I have found having no food in the house, using boric acid and no water, no dripping faucets, will keep them out of your home. You can’t put any food out. Even if it’s in a container the roaches will crawl over it. They can’t get into it but they smell it or something.
One thing I found people do, especially in cities is reuse store boxes. Like we have a store called Aldi, you can pay for bags, bring your own, or use their boxes. Sometimes these boxes roach eggs in them. You don’t see any but you bring boxes home unload your groceries then reuse the box. Bad idea, throw it out.
I wish I had that option. I live in a crumbly old Chinese apartment and the roaches are a permanent fixture. The stairwells are swarmed with them, so there really isn’t a thing I can do. Believe it or not, you can learn to live with them.
yes I’m allergic to soap and shampoo + fabric softener + plastic + latex + cosmetics and some plants especially the most common and it is a huge drag that gets worse with exposure. Magic markers paints dyes the list goes on. but I do deal with it mostly by avoiding them.
I’m afraid of pestisides very afraid, I like breathing.
Omniscient:
Thank you . Actually my landlord is willing to let me out of the lease and pay for the truck and help me move . At least that is what she said two weeks ago. She is an attorney and this is a small town.
Thank you again to everyone who has responded with information I’m reading everything.
When I lived in Georgia…it was common to buy some sort of lizard. They were small and had ‘rules’ of getting so many of them per so many square feet and replensihing them with so many more every few months.
A coworker got them. She said she took about 50 of them home, and let them loose in the living room. they scattered to the 4 winds and she never saw them again except an occasional dead one and she had to shake her shoes out before putting them on because one might be in there.
She was a bit squeamish about the lizards but she said the roach problem disappeared quickly so she loved those lizards.
I had a similar problem. A horde of roaches moved into my old apartment when the drug den next door was raided and cleaned out. I fled, but despite putting roach traps into every box and spraying the new place before we got here, there problem came with me.
Or maybe it came down the hill, as I share a property line with a convenience store. (never do this, it’s worse than it sounds!) At the time I had a small dog, two large aquariums, and a crawling baby in the house, so foggers and sprays were out of the question.
Anyhoo, after hundreds of dollars and tons of effort, here’s what finally worked. A combination of Dupont Advion bait for immediate kills
It took about three weeks, but the results are incredible. After almost two years of hard battle, I discovered that these roaches are immune to the poison used in most insecticides (including the ones the professionals charged me hundreds of $s to spray around repeatedly). I also found out that no amount of cleaning will get rid of them - they can live off the wool in your carpets and the skin cells you shed daily.
Advion and Gentrol, my new heros! And it cost about $60.00 I think.
We used growth regulator to good effect against roaches when we lived in a semi-scuzzy apratment building.
If you don’t want to use any kind of insecticide, what about glue boards AKA sticky traps? It’s a piece of thin cardboard, about 9" X 4", coated with an adhesive. You put them on the floor against a wall, or on a counter, or wherever. Bugs walk into them and get stuck permanently. They usually stay sticky for a few months, but if you have that many roaches, they may fill up faster than that anyway. They are quite cheap, so you can fairly carpet your place with them if you want.
I hate the idea of glue boards but understand I may need to go there.
didn’t catch anything in the coffee can but just when you let your guard down. one crawled out of the kitchen sink drain. Thanks to something I read here I managed to get it together and pour bleach down the drain. This happened this morning between my first and second cup of coffee. the only food left out in a week were the coffee grounds from my 1rst cup.
I don’t know if that means there are a million of them or the ones that are left are desperate?