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Hi, good morning. This is Ben with Ben’s pest control and today I want to talk to you about pests in appliances. This is kind of an interesting topic at least for me. Recently, we’ve had in our business we’ve had a lot of calls lately for people with roaches and, and roaches are one of the main pests that we always seem to find and associate with appliances. Now, it’s not impossible for things like ants to get into appliances, ants will definitely go into appliances, especially if there’s either food or water associated. But we normally finance around dishwashers we finance around microwaves. But when it comes to roaches, roaches seem to, to really favor the appliance situation. And what I would say is this when we go into some homes, especially homes that have really bad Roach problems, it’s not uncommon for us to do what we call a clean out service and the cleanout service will be a situation where we have the client take everything out of their cabinets, and we will spray out the cabinets to try to make sure that any nesting sites get thoroughly and effectively treated for the roaches. So what happens is, in essence, you have treated the entire kitchen, let’s say all of the cabinets behind the cabinets above the cabinets below the cabinets, inside the cabinets, the hinges, and you’ve made all of these areas to be effectively non harborage places. So what we find in a lot of cases is the roaches will then move into the areas that aren’t as affected. And as I started this, that can be the appliances. So the appliances being electronic, you cannot just go in and spray chemicals into those appliances, you’d end up destroying and damaging those appliances. So what I want to do is I want to break down by appliances, what we see in a lot of cases. And I’m going to start with the microwave the microwave is is a very interesting appliance because obviously you use it to heat up food people use it to heat up drinks. So you can have food and water inside of the microwave. But strangely, in my experience, roaches in the microwave don’t seem to be quite as common. I don’t know if it’s because the the microwave emits those waves of I don’t know if it’s radiation, I don’t know what waves it uses, but it heats up intensely. But the roaches just don’t seem to prefer the microwaves as much as they do the other appliances.
Now,
the next appliance that seems to be very common is the refrigerator, the refrigerator, a lot of people don’t realize to cool down and to create the cold environment to store your food in, there’s actually condensation that is formed in those coils. And sometimes in the old days, a lot of the refrigerators actually had drip pans underneath. So you end up with a situation where the inside of the refrigerator creates this water and then where the motor is for the refrigerator, it can actually run pretty warm. So in a lot of cases, your refrigerators are absolutely an ideal situation you have you have food, water and shelter the three things that any living creature needs to survive, especially that moisture underneath of it is very enticing to the roaches. So what we find a lot of times is the refrigerators really need to be treated, in my opinion, especially underneath in the back and around the base of it where the roaches can live. A lot of people have been surprised to find out that refrigerators in houses that have a really bad infestation, we have actually found ness of roaches in the gasket for the freezer and in the gasket for the refrigerator. And in some cases when the roaches are just terrible. Their desire for food becomes so strong that they will move those nests into the gaskets of the refrigerator and in some cases even try to go into the freezer or into the refrigerator to get food which usually doesn’t pan out very well because that’s not a temperature that they thrive in. But those gaskets can be a stronghold. Normally when the problem gets pretty bad, so the refrigerators are a constant problem. So the next is the the next appliance I want to discuss Really the dishwasher. The dishwasher is a hot hot spot. For bugs. Of course you have dirty dishes, you have water to clean those dishes, you have an appliance that’s running. And that appliance has a lot of insulation around it. Nowadays, they’re trying to make dishwashers more and more quiet. So they’re constantly adding things to them to try to make them run more efficiently and not make as much noise. So if you’ve ever pulled out your dishwasher a senior dishwasher before it’s installed, you actually have insulation wrapped around the dishwasher, usually from the top on down the sides. And that insulation creates an area underneath it where roaches can be harbored very easily. And then when the appliance runs, there’s water and when there’s dirty dishes in there, there’s food for the roaches. Now that’s just one aspect the the sides of the dishwasher and the top of the dishwasher. But the actual door of the dishwasher itself, a lot of people will report seeing that roaches go in and out of the door hinges, and they’re actually living inside the door. And once again, when the when the dishwasher is opened up, that door falls out and you have electronic components, which are very sensitive and have to be treated with great care. But inside that door, you have more insulation. And of course that there’s easy access to water and food. So that door seems to harbor a lot of bugs. The last appliance is the stove. Now the stove is an interesting one because there’s a lot of people who don’t cook as much as they used to. But in a lot of cases when people cook their spills and there’s messes and if you’ve ever pulled out a stove there can easily be a mess behind the stove, on the sides of the stove on the sides of the cabinets. But the stove doesn’t normally produce as much access to water, let’s say now you have boiling over with pots that might boil over and there’s water in the pans. But what we find with the stoves is the roaches love to get into the control panels. And the control panels, especially the stalls where the control panels in the back of the stove that say elevated up from the cooking surface. They really like to get in there to the point where we have multiple times seen roaches actually running around inside the digital clocks of the stoves. So they are way embedded into this equipment. And what I try to explain to people is that those appliances, the roaches can be way way in them. And it takes time to get them to completely come out of those appliances.
So one of the things I would say is a lot of times, what we will do is we will try to bait the appliances as best we can in hopes that the food draws them out and that they take the food back to the nest, let’s say inside of the appliance. In some cases, we do have clients that will sign a waiver and allow us to take the appliance apart, but it’s risky because once we take the appliance apart, we can’t be certain that the appliance is going to function properly. Depending on the type of treatment we have to do. And you don’t have to take it apart to apply bait. But if you’re taking it apart, a lot of times if you do find a nest that people want it dead and want to treat it. So any kind of chemical application with baits or I’m sorry with sprays or dusts, that could be a problem for the long term of the appliance. One of the reasons that I bring this up is that I just want people to know that, especially if you’re buying a used appliance, it is very important that you try to be diligent about inspecting that appliance. The problem here is a lot of people who have never had roaches will buy something that they find online, especially a refrigerator, they want a second refrigerator in their garage, let’s say to store extra food in sometimes their their stove will break and they’ll pick up a new stove. And they’ll buy these appliances and they’ll bring them home not knowing that they’re actually introducing the roaches from one previous environment then into their home. And once they introduce those roaches into the home, it’s just a matter of time before they spread out and they start to infest the rest of the kitchen or other parts of the home. And people get very confused on where the source of this problem actually originated. But it’s pretty simple. It’s the appliance that you bought and brought into the house. So if you’re going to buy something used, please do yourself a favor and make sure that you really inspect it. With refrigerator Don’t be afraid to pick up the cardboard backing and stuff. Inside the motor area, check the gaskets on a refrigerator on a stove, try to look at the control panel. Look at the back and the sides and try to see if you see any sign to droppings or anything kind of that could be running around with a dishwasher, pick up the insulation cover on the back. If there’s a lot of speckles that could possibly be feces, that’s a sign that they could have been living there. With a microwave, there’s not a whole lot you can look at, the best thing to do is possibly if you’re allowed to plug it in and run it for a while. And just keep an eye out and see if anything comes out of it. If with the microwave running, if something comes out of it, you know you got a problem, you can kind of do the same thing with the dishwasher. But you have to run it through the whole cycle a lot of times and run it on high heat, maybe run the drying load the drying function just to get the heat up and see if anything comes out with a stove. You can do you can turn it on and just watch it again. But with the stove depending on where the control panel is, it can be hit or miss on whether or not it gets hot enough to drive those bugs out of it. The important thing here to remember is that these appliances could be a source and you want to do your due diligence and check them as closely as you can before you bring that into your house. Now if you’re already in a situation where you’ve brought them into your house, and the roaches are there and they’re out of control and you need help, please consider looking at our website or giving us a call at 772-878-1972, we’d love the opportunity to talk to you and see what we can do to help you take care of the problem. Thank you and I hope you have a great day.
