Most people know about pest control as a concept, but not what it actually involves beyond the basics. “Pests” is an umbrella term containing a whole spread of different creatures, and not all of them need to be dealt with in the same way.
Inspection
One of the most often-forgotten parts of pest control is the inspection stage, where specialists actually investigate the situation. Thanks to Hollywood, a lot of people assume that pest control involves an immediate response that makes the entire house off-limits, but that is not true at all.
Real-life pest control specialists will take their time inspecting the property to see how many pests there are, what kind of solutions would work best, and how they can apply those solutions quickly. For example, termite inspections are all about locating the termites before they can cause any serious damage to your home.
Inspection can sometimes even bring up more pests that you were not aware of – a search for rats could reveal hidden termites or a hole in the floor near an ant’s nest. A thorough inspection is often the best way to get peace of mind and ensure that you know that all of the pests have been dealt with.
Treatment
Dealing with pests does not always mean completely eradicating them at first sight. A large part of many pest control businesses is the control aspect: managing the pest infestation and getting them to leave in the long term, rather than just killing the ones that are immediately present.
This is very important since some homes are simply more prone to infestations than others. If you ‘bomb’ an entire house with chemical mixes that kill rats, all of the rats will die, but there will be nothing stopping them from moving back in once the chemicals dissipate. Companies like TMO Pest Control can handle this well, offering treatments for each common type of pest.
Treatment and management allow a pest control company to tackle the problem in a more permanent way, finding solutions that can discourage pests from returning. This also causes fewer problems with your home needing to be evacuated or pets having to be sent away for a while to avoid getting poisoned as well.
Extermination
If no other options are available, or a pest infestation has simply gotten too large to deal with quietly, then extermination is still a common option. However, extermination is not just about obliterating the pests there – it is about making sure that the infestation as a whole is gone.
Many exterminators use methods that will completely kill off anything related to the infestation, such as pumping bug-killing toxins into the spaces between walls or giving an anthill tainted food. These do not just kill individual creatures, but the entire hive/nest/infestation as a whole.
This makes extermination a very precise art since there can be some cases where serious care needs to be applied to solve the problem. An exterminator can’t just flood a space with poison because it might create lingering toxins that could harm pets or children in the area.