4 Bad Habits That Can Attract Cockroaches
Nobody wants to share their home with cockroaches, but many homeowners end up dealing with these unwelcome pests. Studies have shown that at least 78% of homes in urban areas have these pests while other studies have reported figures as high as 98%. If you don't want your home to be among this majority, you need to make sure that you're not doing anything to attract them, such as these four bad habits.
Saving your dirty dishes for the next morning
Most people have felt too tired to wash their dishes right after dinner and left them sitting in the kitchen sink until the next morning. Once in a while, this isn't a big deal, but if it becomes a habit, you could attract cockroaches to your home. Cockroaches, like all pests, are attracted to sources of food, and your dirty dishes are an easy meal for them.
Make sure to wash your dinner dishes and clean up your kitchen before you go to bed, not the next morning. If you are too tired to clean up, you need to fully submerge your dirty dishes in soapy water to keep cockroaches from smelling the food and coming to investigate.
Not repairing torn window screens
Cockroaches get into your home by crawling through holes and gaps in the outside of your home. If you have home repair projects that you've been putting off, like fixing tears in your window screens, cockroaches could be using those areas as entryways. Every day that goes by without these gaps being repaired is another day that cockroaches can come into your home, so you need to get repairs done as quickly as possible.
Once you've fixed the gaps and holes that you know about, search for more, and when you find them, fix those, too. Pay extra attention to places like where pipes and wires enter your home or around vents. It's really hard to find every single gap that can allow cockroaches entry, but try to seal as many of them as you can.
Leaving clutter on your floors
About one-quarter of Americans say that they have cluttered homes, and while this clutter is a source of annoyance and stress for you, it's a safe and comfortable hiding place for cockroaches. Cockroaches need shelter to survive and reproduce, and if shelter is easy to find inside your home, they'll be attracted to it.
Cleaning up your clutter is very important if you want to avoid a cockroach infestation. Ideally, furniture should be the only things that touch your floors. You need to get all of your dirty clothes, papers, boxes, and other clutter objects off of the floor, either by throwing them out or by storing them on shelves.
Not fixing leaky faucets
A leaky faucet may not seem like a big deal to you, but to a cockroach, it's a plentiful source of fresh water. Cockroaches need water to survive, and while they can hunt for sources of water outdoors, they prefer to live near a constant supply of water. Your leaky faucet can provide a colony with water security, so once the cockroaches find it, they won't want to leave.
A single leaky faucet, if it drips only 20 times a minute, can produce nearly two gallons of water every single day. Over the course of a year, your leaky faucet will have provided the cockroaches living in your home with 694 gallons of fresh, clean drinking water. If you fix the faucet, cockroaches that wander into your home may decide that your house isn't a good place to live, and will go somewhere else to find something to drink.
Nobody wants cockroaches, but if you're doing any of these four things, you may be inviting them to move in with you. If you've already seen cockroaches in your home, you may already be infested, and should call a pest control company from a site like http://cavanaughspest.com right away.
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