Twenty useful pest control tips for an Indian home, from the people who do the treatments

Short, practical, and learned the hard way. Each one is something a pest control professional on TheHire has told a customer more than once. Save this; most of it costs nothing.

Safety

1. Ask for the chemical's name and the re-entry time before the sprayer is filled. A name and a number of hours is the answer. If you do not get one, stop the job. The standard treatment at ₹2 per sq ft is safe when both are known.
2. Cover the fish tank and switch off its air pump before any spray in the room. Pyrethroids kill fish at concentrations you cannot smell, and the pump pulls the mist into the water.
3. Never pour pesticide into a drink bottle. Most household poisonings start with an unlabelled bottle. Keep the original pack with its label and its antidote line, locked, high.
4. Do not poison rats inside a flat. The rat dies in a wall and the smell lasts two weeks. Trap indoors; bait in locked stations only in the shaft or the compound, which is how the ₹1,500 job does it.
5. Do not spray a bee hive. Rock bees on a balcony are dangerous when disturbed and relocatable when left alone. Close the door and call for the ₹2,500 safe removal; it is done in the evening when the bees are on the comb.

Kitchen

6. Gel goes where you do not see cockroaches. Hinge sides of cabinet doors, under the sink around the trap, behind the fridge, inside the switchboard. Dots the size of a rice grain, a dozen for a kitchen. Where you see them is where they are passing through.
7. Never spray over the gel. Spray repels; gel attracts. One cancels the other. A technician applies gel in the hidden places and spray along the drain edges, never the same spot.
8. Dry sink, closed bin, every night. Cockroaches need water more than food. A dry sink overnight and a lidded wet-waste bin remove what the treatment cannot.
9. Do not mop the skirtings for a week after a spray. The residual film is the treatment. Mopping it off is the most common way a warranty is voided by the household.
10. Tap the platform's wooden skirting once a quarter. A dull sound or fine powder underneath is drywood termites or beetles, and a ₹900 per unit injection now is a cabinet saved.

Bedroom

11. Check luggage on the balcony after every trip, before it comes into the bedroom. Bed bugs ride in seams and zips. A torch along the lining takes two minutes.
12. Do not move an infested mattress to another room. That is how a one-room problem at ₹1,500 becomes a whole-home problem at ₹4 per sq ft.
13. Keep the second bed bug visit. It is 10 to 15 days after the first and it is for the eggs. Treatments that "did not work" are almost always treatments where the second visit was skipped.
14. Wash bedding at 60 °C and dry it in the sun between the two visits. Heat kills what the spray cannot reach inside the fabric.
15. Pull wardrobes off external walls once a year and look behind with a torch for mud lines. Termites prefer the dark side of the wardrobe against the outside wall, and that is where the first tube appears.

Building, balcony and garden

16. The weekly dry day. Empty the cooler, the pot saucers, the AC tray, the bucket on the terrace. The dengue mosquito breeds in a bottle cap of clean water in a week, and no fogging reaches it.
17. Mesh the overhead tank overflow pipe and keep the lid on. The overflow is the most common tank-side mosquito nursery in a building, and nobody looks at it.
18. Larvicide monthly, fogging rarely. For a society, ₹600 per visit in the drains and sumps lasts weeks; ₹900 per visit kills adults for an afternoon. Fog for a dengue case or an event, not as a routine.
19. Switch off the outdoor lights for a few evenings after the first rain. Winged termites and ants swarm towards light at dusk. Discarded wings on a sill the next morning are the sign to call for a free inspection.
20. Seal the route, not just the rat. Wire mesh over the drain outlets, steel wool around pipe entries, a sweep under the kitchen door. The proofing half of a rodent job is the half that lasts.

Three more for people who own the house

21. Treat termites in April, not August. Dry soil takes the chemical; wet soil dilutes it. The ₹7 per sq ft treatment done before the rains covers the swarming season with its year of warranty.
22. If you are building, insist on pre-construction treatment at ₹12 per sq ft, and ask for the chemical's name and the stage-wise certificate. It is the cheapest termite protection the house will ever have, and it cannot be done later.
23. Put the ground floor and the garden house on an AMC. ₹3,500 a year for four visits, with the termite walk and the drain check each quarter, is less than two emergency calls and the warranty never lapses.

Related tips you might want next

A kitchen that attracts everything is a deep-clean before it is a treatment; the cleaning guides cover that. A garden that breeds mosquitoes and feeds ants is a drainage and pot-saucer problem; the gardener guides cover it. And a drain that keeps sending cockroaches up is a drain problem; the septic and drain guides pick up where this one stops.