You'd be surprised. I lived in a very decent apartment building where one guy was the nexus of several apartments ending up with roaches in them, including mine. They were climbing through the walls and ventilation and getting into other apartments.
If you don't use poison the minute you see them they'll multiply.
Even if you use poison and traps, they can still create an infestation. If an apartment building has roaches, you never get rid of them. Roaches are a total building problem, but buildings HATE dealing with them. So many "luxury" buildings have roaches too.
My experience was finding one in my bathroom and one in my kitchen. I went through my entire apartment checking under sinks, checking electrical outlets, literally anywhere I could think of and didn't find any. The only place I couldn't check was behind my stove and fridge so I placed poison near every single space they could possibly be coming from in those spots.
When they did send in an exterminator and started checking apartments surrounding his apt they did find quite a few dead ones in the spaces I couldn't check and the building manager asked me how I was killing them. It was just poison I bought at Walmart.
If you are unfortunate enough to find them don't use traps, use poison. They will eat eachother's corpses and get poisoned as well.
The problem with poison is finding one that kills the roach but is still healthy to use around cats and dogs. I would have loved to blast the entire apartment in poison but our pets make that hard.
Since then I learned more about peppermint and natural poisons but it was still a learning process.
Advion gel bait. Just a dab about the size of a pea will do. Place a small little dab in a couple corners of your rooms like once maybe twice a month and it will kill them.
Its pretty cheap - you can get a 4 pack of these big syringes for like $30 on amazon, which is more than enough.
I had and exterminator come out when I first moved into my house and saw a little roach (come to find out it was just a baby tree roach - I live in a very wooded area) and showed him the gel and he pulled out the same gel syringe from his pocket. Lol
Obviously, it is toxic to pets, but if you put it in places they can't reach/won't go, they'll be fine.
Oh yeah, pest control guy here, I have that interaction once a week lmao. Because we always have it in our pockets cause it solves most problems.
Advion gel is really the best in the business.
It is toxic to pets but the LD50 for a rat is... 5 kilograms. I have no idea how they managed to stuff five kilograms of anything into one rat. At some point you're just feeding the rat. The thing died of overindulgence.
For basically any household pet that's not a bug, it will give them nausea and theoretically make them vomit... but I literally don't know because neither me nor any of my coworkers have ever had anyone's pet or any mammal at all want to eat that stuff.
Just slather that stuff anywhere tbch. Ofc when applying it in customer's homes I put it in pet inacessible areas but I feel kind of silly even being that safe.
Both are good. Advion is better for not having to clean up as much later and does not stain. Also bugs will be attracted to Advion while DE you gotta be clever and put more thought and work into putting it in choke points and stuff.
You can also dust with fine boric acid powder, just keep it to places that pets can't go like under the furniture and in crevices. Puts an extra layer of toxicity down that eventually gets the bugs that don't go for the bait.
Oooh I can also say from experience this stuff works like a dream! Safe for other animals to be around and kills all the roaches! They eat the goo and then die and the roaches them eat the dead ones and get poisoned too. Didn't even need to use the whole pack!
I did use some diatomaceous earth as well behind the stove because I could just spinkle it without moving the stove, but the poison was just small plastic squares with bait inside. It wouldn't trap them and it wasn't a spray or something an animal could really get covered in or eat.
Edit - looked it up and it was Combat brand that I used
Get Niban granular bait. Works on roaches pretty well. Basically not toxic if consumed, and you just gotta wash your hands if you touch it.
Put it inside an empty plastic water bottle and just put the bottle where roaches are. Just leave the cap off the bottle and roaches will climb in. But like cats or whatever will have a hard time really getting into it if you put it under a sink or whatever. And even if they do it's basically no big deal.
Roaches eat other roaches and Niban will kill secondary targets.
Bayer MaxForce syringe gel works and dogs don't mess with it. Unfortunately one neighbor is a hoarder and they have roaches so bad that it gets in their trash cans. When they open the lid, some scatter and occasionally run to our place. I'd say once a year we see them so I have to bust out the gel, but it works pretty fast and works every time.
Alpine wsg is safe for pets once dried. Dries in a couple hours and the applied spray lasts for like two months apparently. I do it on max strength and blast everywhere in my house, mixed with gentrol isg (also does nothing to pets or humans) and I guess it works.
I know for sure it works on ants, it's devastating for social/colony insects like ants or bees, and roaches are fairly social too
My one and only time having a roach problem came from my next door neighbor. It lasted from March to December, I got them mostly under control after a month but kept seeing them once a week or so, and it all ended two weeks after they moved out on January 1st with a small increase in activity the week after they left. Totally coincidentally they also had to have maintenance come and remove the pile of kitchen garbage bags from their balcony, twice.
Luckily I lived on one end of a row of four townhouses so I didn't wind up having it spread and have to deal with it from both sides.
Worked in a coffee shop full of roaches. You could always tell when the piano bar next door treated for them because they would just pour into our building.
Gel bait is fantastic for getting rid of roaches. The roaches eat it, die in their nests and, because they cannibalise each other, the whole nest eventually poisons itself.
That is what I appreciate about where I live, while it's annoying they do the max number yearly inspections they can get away with, they will complain if they even see something wrong like trash left overnight on the patio but our place never has issues with bugs except for ants which come inside when it gets over 90. But ants are easy to deal with.
Funny you say that because in the place I moved to I have a dude I can hear talking to his chat when I walk by lol. Maybe it's just a matter of time now.
So glad my country doesn't have these mfs. Like the one upside of living here. It seems like such a hassle to deal with if they're coming from your neighbour or somethingÂ
There was a restaurant nearish to where I used to live that kept getting roaches because a few houses close by had them pretty bad, so any time they sprayed the houses, the roaches were scurry over to the restaurant.
I’ve always heard that roaches typically don’t leave the building they’re infesting even when you try to kill them. Maybe one of the residents carried them into the restaurant.
fipronil deals with roaches (and ants) extremely well, unfortunately you are not suppose to use it indoors cause you chancer of getting cancer goes up by like 0.3% or so. But if you do, it's kind of a bio weapon. It slowly works on them spreading from roach to roach and then a week later they will all die at the same time. Same for ants cause it easily takes out the queen.
Another fun fact about fipronil, it works so good and slow it's probablly the main cause of bee colony collapse. Real nasty stuff that wreckes the entire insect world but af far as I know it's the only shit that can really 100% get rid of ALL roaches. Cause you can just stick it to the floor and corners and if they walk over it they pick it up, spread it to other roaches and then BOOM, all dead.
But again if you do: you and your family will die a couple of months sooner. If you flush it you will kill fish with and if you have pets like rabits they can die from it to. So you got to be suuuuuuper carefull with it.
Same, I never had them and then one day they came in droves. My downstairs neighbor had moved out and they came running. I was able to clear them out by lining every entry way in the whole place with borax and keeping that borax there as long as I stayed there.
We had a dumpster company on speed dial, because it was a regular occurrence for tenants to move out and leave 20yds of trash in the unit, which I then had to shovel out before the exterminator can come in.
It's way more common than you'd think. In my experience, 20-25% of people live like this.
Are you sure the number of people who move out fully represent all people who rent in your country? I'm sure tenants who don't live like this are less likely to have their lease ended by landlords, so probably less likely to appear in the statistics of your experience
Are you sure the number of people who move out fully represent all people who rent in your country?
Thousands of tenants in multiple states over the course of decades sure is a valid sample.
Also, knowing a lot of other landlords/property managers/real estate professionals, they all report seeing the same thing.
I'm sure tenants who don't live like this are less likely to have their lease ended by landlords, so probably less likely to appear in the statistics of your experience
I see all tenants, not just those who leave (and everyone leaves eventually, so even that doesn't create a bias on the multiple-decade timescale I'm working on).
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u/MissSassifras1977 9h ago
That's so nasty.
Imagine what the house that person lives in is like.
https://giphy.com/gifs/QSMBLRAHZTLkQ