Residential pest control

How we work in homes

Home treatments are different from industrial work, and we treat them differently. Technicians work room by room with your routine in mind, favouring gel baits, secured stations and targeted applications over blanket spraying. You are told before we arrive what to prepare, and before we leave what was applied, where, and what to expect next.

For households that want to stay ahead of problems rather than react to them, our quarterly general pest programme keeps cockroaches, ants and other crawling insects suppressed year round, with the same technician visiting each time wherever possible.

What a first visit actually involves

The first visit is an inspection before it is a treatment. The technician walks the property with you, looks at the places pests are actually living rather than the places you have seen them — under sinks, behind appliances, along skirting, in roof spaces, around drains and the external perimeter — and works out how they are getting in. Most call-outs turn up an entry point or a food source nobody had connected to the problem.

You then get a plain explanation of what is happening, what the treatment involves, and whether it is a one-visit job or something that needs a programme. If it is the second, we say so at the start rather than after the first treatment has not held.

Preparing your home, and the day itself

Preparation is usually small: clear the area under the kitchen sink, move pet bowls and children's toys out of the rooms being treated, cover or remove aquariums and turn off their pumps, and put exposed food away. We send the specific list with your booking, because it differs by treatment — a bedbug job needs stripped beds and laundered linen, a termite job needs access to the perimeter.

Most treatments take between forty minutes and two hours for a typical home. For the majority of jobs you can stay in the property, and where you cannot, we tell you the vacancy period before the day rather than on the doorstep.

Living with the treatment afterwards

Expect to see more activity in the first few days, not less. That is normal, particularly with baiting: insects are moving around and feeding on the bait, which is the treatment working rather than failing. Do not spray over bait points or clean treated skirting and crevices during that window — a household insecticide from a supermarket shelf will stop foragers taking bait back to the nest and undo the visit.

If activity has not dropped off by the end of the period your technician gives you, call us. Where the treatment carries a warranty, the return visit is free.

Apartments and shared buildings

A flat is only ever as pest-free as the building around it. Cockroaches and rodents travel through shared risers, service ducts and rubbish areas, so treating one unit while the next is untreated often means reinfestation within weeks. We will still treat a single apartment, and we will tell you honestly when the real answer is a building-wide programme through your management committee — which is usually cheaper per household than everyone treating separately anyway.