Winter Pests Love Your Home

Our own, David Niles, recently wrote an article for The Cherokee Consumer Connection.  Check it out below:

Winter Pests Love Your Home

By David Niles

Winter weather is a time where pests want to hide in the warmth of your home.  Most folks think of rats and mice, but many other pests like ants are also prone to hiding indoors in the wintertime.

Rats, mice, and squirrels love to nest in attics during the winter.  They burrow through the insulation and huddle around furnaces.  They can be especially annoying by scratching in the ceiling and walls, keeping you up all night.  They can also turn your attic into a disaster zone by contaminating the insulation with feces and urine.

It is a nasty thought to think of all the airborne contaminates floating around the attic and into the HVAC system of your home.  These rodents need to keep their teeth sharp and constantly gnaw on anything to sharpen their teeth.  They chew on wires and in some cases have led to house fires.

Raccoons, opossums, and bats can also contaminate and destroy attics.  These critters can be eliminated with proper exclusion work.  Winter is a great time to ensure all entry points into the home are sealed off.  Many do not realize there is a gap between the shingle line and the gutter line, the usual entry point into the home for unwanted pests.  A good exterminator can seal off these areas so animals can no longer get in these gaps.

Roaches and silverfish enjoy huddling in the warmth of attic insulation, and many homes see an influx of these two pests during the winter.  Cockroaches also spread disease, and their droppings and saliva can trigger asthma attacks, especially in young children.

Winter is also a great time to consider the amount of insulation in your attic.  A low amount can lead to higher energy bills with all the heat escaping right through your attic.  The lower the R-value (thermal resistance) in your attic the higher the odds that you are spending too much on energy costs and wearing down your HVAC system faster.

Northwest Exterminating provides a pest control-insulation product called TAP InsulationTAP stands for Thermal Acoustical Pest Control.  This product keeps pests out of your attic and reduces energy bills, while keeping a good sound barrier in the attic.  Unlike fiberglass insulation, this product is 87% recycled newsprint and is a better fire retardant than fiberglass.  The usual savings on energy bills is 20-38% with the Energy Star rated insulation.  This material is created with boric acid built into it to repel pests and must be installed by a professional with a pest control license.

David Niles is an inspection specialist with Northwest Exterminating in our Canton service center
David Niles
770.704.6650
[email protected]

EPA meets about Bedbugs

If you hadn’t heard about bedbugs before 2010, you have surely heard about them by now.  In the past, bedbugs were most often found in homeless shelters and housing projects.  More recently, they have begun to take over movie theaters, homes, and upscale shopping stores across the US.

On Tuesday, February 1, the EPA conducted the second National Bed Bug Summit to discuss research on bedbugs and the steps for prevention and efficiency in treating bedbug cases.

Click HERE to read FOXNews.com’s article on the National Bed Bug Summit

Track Bed Bugs with New iphone App

By Melissa Ruggieri
The Atlanta Journal-Constituition

Bedbugs can follow you, but now it’s time for retaliation.

The new Bed Bug Alert app for the Apple iPhone enables users to input data about bedbug incidents and see where others have reported sightings anywhere in the nation.

The $1.99 app was developed by Adam Kotkin, CEO of Apps Genius, who lives in the bed bug capital, New York.

“About once a week I rip off my sheets and start looking closely. I haven’t been to a movie in six months. I hate public places right now,” Kotkin said.

Atlanta doesn’t make the top 10 list of cities with the most reported bedbug sightings. (Following New York are Philadelphia, Detroit, Cincinnati and Chicago.) But there are 25 hotels in metro Atlanta marked by red pinpoints on the the app, which uses Google maps for users to zoom in on locations.

The Georgia Department of Community Health doesn’t track bedbug infestations in the state because they’re too common, a spokeswoman said last week. Local health departments are likely to keep closer track; for example, the Fulton County Department of Public Health has logged nine complaints about bedbugs in the county in 2010. Kevin Jones, acting director of environmental health services, said five complaints came from “tourist accommodations” (hotels and motels) and two each from homeless shelters and apartment complexes.

Kotkin said he and his crew gather information about bed bugs from more than a hundred sources. A staff of 11 at Apps Genius works seven days a week to pull and verify data from public health records and press releases.

The “Report Bed Bugs” tab on the app is built in for users to report their findings while traveling and the staff sorts through thousands of them daily.

But, as with any user-generated content, verification is nebulous. And even if a site has corrected the problem, the location will still pop up on the alert with a notation of how long ago the bed bug issue was reported.

The next version of the software will color-code the locations to note how long they’ve been on the site.

And in the event of false postings, “We have a mechanism that someone at the location can use to contact us and we’ll take it off,” Kotkin said.

The Bed Bug Alert isn’t the first database of reported findings. Various Facebook pages and longstanding websites such as bedbugregistry.com and bedbugreports.com also include lists of sightings searchable by city or hotel.

Apps Genius is also planning a bed bug app for BlackBerry and Droid devices.

Staff writer Shelia Poole contributed to this article.

Source: http://www.ajc.com/news/track-bed-bugs-with-725919.html

Pin It on Pinterest

Call Now Button