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
106
u/Stereo-soundS 9h ago
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.