6 Tips for Getting Rid of Ants in Your Home

Your home should be the place where you feel safest of all, so it can be frustrating when you have unwanted invaders in your home. Ants can get into your home from entry points far more varied than most other pests. It’s because of their size and how many of them there are. If you’re not doing everything you can to keep ants out of your home, they will find a way in.

With that in mind, here are a few ways you can get the ants out and keep them out.

1. Keep a Clean Home

Before you try too hard to get rid of ants, make sure you’re doing what you can to stop attracting them to your home. There’s a reason there are ants in your home, and you may be able to do something about what’s drawing them there. The ants could be coming in because there’s food left out in your home, like crumbs on the counter or an open garbage can. They’re drawn to sweet food last of all, so any grains of sugar that aren’t tidied up or bits of snacks that have odors wafting from the rubbish bin will attract ants.

You want to keep your garbage can closed at all times and make sure your house (particularly the kitchen area) stays tidy. It can be difficult to keep a clean home throughout the entire week, but hiring a cleaning service can help you out and make it easier to stay on top of the chores that need to be done. You should clean regularly and thoroughly so that ants won’t find as much food to feed on.

2. Keep Your Home Dry

In the hot times of year, ants will be drawn to sources of water. it doesn’t take much water to satisfy an ant, so if there are even a few drops of water in your home, ants may want to come in your house for them. Anytime there’s a spill in your home, you want to dry it up. If you have a leaky faucet or sources of water throughout the house, you need to try to fix those issues as soon as possible. Usually, ants will be drawn in by food sources, but then they may make their presence known when they find water in your house as well.

3. Close the Gaps

It doesn’t take much space to allow ants in your home, but you ought to do what you can to close up any gaps from the outside to your home’s interior. Look for spaces under doorways that you can close up, and check windows and other openings as well to make sure they are as airtight as possible. You won’t be able to make your home completely blocked off to ants, but you can find spaces where they could get in and close those up as best as possible. This will also keep scents from escaping your house and drawing the ants inside.

4. Put Down Ant Toxin

How do you kill ants effectively so that they don’t keep coming back? You’ll need the kind of bait or traps that won’t kill them right away and that they will carry back to the nest. That will effectively kill the majority of the ants in your home, if you are only dealing with one nest and the ants actually do take the toxin with them to the nest.

Diatomaceous earth is one of the best chemicals you can use to kill ants. It kills them but not on contact. They can carry the diatomaceous earth with them back to their nest, and then the DA will obliterate the insides of the ants, drying them out. It dehydrates very effectively, and ants have so little water content that they cannot handle substances that dehydrate them.

You can spread this powder along the areas of your home where ants tend to gather. If you buy food grade DA, then you don’t have to worry about harming yourself or your family if you ingest a little of it.

5. Spray the Ants

Maybe you want a more direct method of killing the ants, and for that, you will need to use an insecticide or ant spray. You can buy ant spray or any kind for spray formulated to kill crawling insects, or you can make it yourself with a few ingredients. A simple combination of water and dish soap will work great, and you can combine them at a ratio of 1:1. Put that combo in a spray bottle and use it directly on the ants to kill them dead. If you don’t have a spray bottle, just pour the mixture on the ants and then clean them up after they die.

6. Use Essential Oils to Keep Them Away

There are a number of methods you can use to keep ants out of your house without having to look for them or close up spaces they can use to get into. You can put down oils or fragrances that they hate, and there are a few essential oils that are really good at keeping the ants at bay.

Try using any of the following essential oils:

• Clove

• Orange

• Peppermint

• Lemon

• Grapefruit

• Tea tree

You can place these in areas of your home where ants are likely to try to come in, like near doors and windows. Place them in your kitchen to keep ants out of that room in particular, and pretty soon, you shouldn’t see ants in your home again.

These are just a few ways you can get rid of ants and keep them out of your home. You may need more specific methods for getting rid of certain kinds of ants, but these methods will work well in general for most kinds of ants. No matter where you live and how serious the ant problem is, these tips will help you remove them from your home.