Bought a house earlier this year, have a few small areas with the usual Florida suspects, ants and spiders.

Local exterminator wants $140 for initial visit and $40/month which seems expensive. I'm interested in trying to tackle this task on my own. What do I need to know? I'm happy to buy one of those little pump sprayers and some chemicals.

Thank you

Thanks for bringing this up, Mike. I'll be watching the thread.

A door-to-door fellow came by a few weeks ago. Once he started negotiating, it came down to about $160, once a quarter.

For now, I tackle it myself -- about 12 bucks for a gallon of Ortho Home Defense Max. We'll see how it goes.

I've been doing my own for 15 years now and what I do is very simple:

I have a 3 gallon pump sprayer that I fill with a mix of Demon and Bifen IT at the concentration for outside use indicated on the label. A couple of notes on that: First, the order of operations is adding the first concentrate, 2 gallons of water, the second concentrate, then the rest of the water. You should not mix undiluted concentrates. Second, the labels are long and the print is small. Once you figure out the correct concentration get a Sharpie and write it on the bottle for quick reference (e.g. 1 oz./gal). I get 3-4 years out of a bottle of concentrate.

With everything mixed I spray the entire outside perimeter of the house and around all penetrations (doors, windows, outlets, hose bibs, etc,) paying special attention to keeping the mix on hard surfaces - it lasts much longer there, especially in our rainy season. The idea is to create a barrier that insects have to cross to enter the house. I also spray the celling corners in the garage but, importantly, I do not spray anything at all indoors.

I do this 3-4 times per year (roughly June, September, December, and maybe once in February/March), and that's it. I can't say that we have no bugs--it is Florida after all--but they are rare. We had several commercial services before I took over and this works as well or better than all of them, and without any insecticides at all inside the house.

I do my own, using Ortho Home Defense.

In the early Spring, I spray around the covered patios, all the doors and windows, and inside the perimeter of the garage. Takes about 30 minutes, and then I never see any bugs inside for the remainder of the year.

It's like $15/gallon, and a gallon lasts me several years. Call it $5/year.

There's no way I'd pay $580/year for basic pest control.

This is something I have some good experience in. A good friend owns a pest control company and this is how to handle it in Florida.

Buy this stuff

Onslaught

I mix 3 doses in a 3 gallon sprayer, and go around the out side of the house. I spray the boarder of the home 18 inches from grass up. Around all windows and doors. I treat about a 4 foot arc by all doors. Wherever your kitchen is inside the house, nail that shit outside.

I coat the garage entry about 4-5 feet.

This stuff will leave like a milk look on paint, so if you want to do inside you need to keep it right at the joint of the floor and baseboard.

I only spray in am or night never when it is going to rain soon.

If ants are a major problem, add terro granules outside around the perimeter.

Please don't buy the cheapest sprayer. You don't need a commercial grade one but not the cheapest one, it makes life really hard for no reason. The longer handle will help you spray.

I also spray under the eaves, but you need to do that walking backwards or it drips in your face. That gets the spiders. Do high first lap around then low down on the second lap.

quote:

Originally posted by Timdogg6:
This is something I have some good experience in. A good friend owns a pest control company and this is how to handle it in Florida.

Buy this stuff

Onslaught

I mix 3 doses in a 3 gallon sprayer, and go around the out side of the house. I spray the boarder of the home 18 inches from grass up. Around all windows and doors. I treat about a 4 foot arc by all doors. Wherever your kitchen is inside the house, nail that shit outside.

I coat the garage entry about 4-5 feet.

This stuff will leave like a milk look on paint, so if you want to do inside you need to keep it right at the joint of the floor and baseboard.

I only spray in am or night never when it is going to rain soon.

If ants are a major problem, add terro granules outside around the perimeter.

Please don't buy the cheapest sprayer. You don't need a commercial grade one but not the cheapest one, it makes life really hard for no reason. The longer handle will help you spray.

I also spray under the eaves, but you need to do that walking backwards or it drips in your face. That gets the spiders. Do high first lap around then low down on the second lap.

How often?

I have used Talstar Pro with great success. It's active ingredient is Bifenthrin. It is a Pyrethroid pesticide like the active ingredient in Onslaught (esfenvalerate).

You have to be careful with this. Several years ago a man had a pest control business with no training. People relied on him because the pests never returned. He was using pesticides at extreme doses and pesticides for crops. Lots of lawsuits and some very sick people.

quote:

Ortho Home Defense Max

I used to use something called bug barrier in a blue plastic bottle. Couldn't find it at deep homo anymore so I wound up with Raid MAX® Perimeter Protection. The former had a little battery powered pump on it, so I swapped it onto the Raid container. I'm in an apartment with a second floor balcony and I use it on the balcony extensively but also at the threshold of a double garage and front door (also ground floor).
This seems to keep spiders and ants at bay. I will have an invasion of ants on the balcony every year when the rains come otherwise. I will also occasionally find a palmetto bug tits up near the patio door, also after a rain.

Outside of that, whatever the apartments are doing seems to be working for the interior spaces.

I use carpenter ant and termite killer (whatever brand is available mixed as directed). Pump spray the house perimeter 3 feet out from the foundation and 3 feet up the exterior walls and around the basement windows in April and October. No bugs.

I’ve been doing my own for as long as I can remember. I have a three part combo that the Orkin guy I am friends with, helped me put together a while back. It works incredibly well, and it keeps the mosquitos dead.

Talstar is a slow kill. They cross the line and die in a day or two, but it lasts for three months.
Exciter is a quick kill. Cross the line and die in a few minutes to an hour. It only lasts a few weeks.
Those two kill just about every bug, ant, scorpion, centipede, and damn near everything else with an exoskeleton.
The IGR keeps the mosquito larvae from forming. It’s super effective in mosquito control.

I spray the entire 1/4 acre with this stuff.

Talstar and Bifen are essentially the same product (bifenthrin), and it sounds like a lot of folks are using it with good results. Mixing that with something in the permethrin family (Demon, ExciteR), preferably with a long residual, seems to be the winning combo - that's how it was explained to me.

I wouldn't use these on the lawn or shrubs for outdoor pest control, but it's a great system for home perimeter defense.

I've had good results with interior home products and regular use. For me, the few times I've had a "pro" do it, seems like they are way less careful about hosing down walls, linens, furniture, etc. Personally I'd rather have 80% coverage and not spray shit everywhere.

Outside is even easier. Well, unless you have a sister who tosses diatomaceous earth all up and down the walls of your family cabin like a drunken blind spastic cripple with palsy Parkinson combo. That shit was still there 4 years later when I had to resort to tearing it down and rebuilding.

Look for a DIY pest store near you, they'll know what works in your area, and have good advice on how to apply the product properly.

Once you get the products down you might find they are available elsewhere for a bit less, but then again, having knowledge of the products and what you need is important.

You may be able to get on their email update list of what to spray and when for both lawn and pest.

Our only regular pests in Iowa are ants in June or so, it is a certain type of ant and I don't even have to spray inside. Once I see them I stick borax bait traps outside near where they came in and the next day they are gone.

For everything else, glue traps. We have a walkout basement and before we finished it a couple years ago I thoroughly caulked all the expansion joints and where the walls met the floor and that really cut down on spiders, but if you don't have much other insects, you won't have much spiders because there will be nothing for the spiders to eat.

I once got to help family members with a brown recluse infestation in Missouri. We brought in a professional for those, but he said only certain insecticide dusts would work because spiders have to step on it and break the dust capsules for it to actually get up into their body and kill them. Glue traps worked the best so I bought about 30-40 of them and had them all around the baseboards collecting the little demons.

Did you get a termite bond when your bought the house ? They come once a year and have in ground treatment they are staked all around the house.

Occasional cockroach “palmetto bug” would get taken out by it and we’d see them zombie around the garage in death throes. Then started swing more so we bought an 8 pack of roach motels and out them around the garage and no more. Also. Do you have a lot of cardboard boxes in the garage ? They like that.

Wasps just nuke with Bengal spray when you see the nest. We have 2.5 acres and live up against open space and the back border of my property is a natural year round creek. we like the frogs and lizards and even snakes. As well as deer, fox, raccoons, bunnies, and even occasional black bear that cruise through there. So we don’t actively spray for anything else. My neighbors on each side do however spray their lawns in front and I think that forces the frogs and lizards toward my property. I do have a bug zapper outside I will turn on if having an evening outside

quote:

Originally posted by Beancooker:
I’ve been doing my own for as long as I can remember. I have a three part combo that the Orkin guy I am friends with, helped me put together a while back. It works incredibly well, and it keeps the mosquitos dead.

Talstar is a slow kill. They cross the line and die in a day or two, but it lasts for three months.
Exciter is a quick kill. Cross the line and die in a few minutes to an hour. It only lasts a few weeks.
Those two kill just about every bug, ant, scorpion, centipede, and damn near everything else with an exoskeleton.
The IGR keeps the mosquito larvae from forming. It’s super effective in mosquito control.

I spray the entire 1/4 acre with this stuff.

My same exact cocktail combo, even purchased from the same website haha.

Just before a party or whatever, I also do a round of EcoVenger ER3. It's a cedar oil and lemon eucalyptus oil based area denial repellent. You can use our yard the same day you spray.

I use a battery sprayer duct taped to a leaf blower to treat the shrubs and trees around the yard, and direct spray a 24" barrier around the foundation of the house.

[/QUOTE]

How often?[/QUOTE]
About every 3 weeks to a month, keeps me at almost 0 pests.

I Have DIY bug spray forever.
-Go to Lowe’s and get a small pump sprayer that will only be for bugs
-I go to tractor supply and buy Bifen I/T ( or Talstar) a quart
-I mix it per the lable, IIRC 1oz/gal

I spray it around base boards throughout, then go outside and spray the eaves and under windows, into weep holes in the brick.

With ants, I spray a 3x3 area around the mound to get foragers, then adjust the nozzle to stream and use about a quart for the mound. No more ants.

I do it every three months. Been doing this way for decades.

When my neighbor had feral cats I sprayed permethrin all over the yard to kill the fleas immediately (but it doesn’t last long)

What Davel said. Buy the chems on Amazon.