How to Kill Roaches in Your House (Step By Step)

It’s never an easy day trying to control pests such as roaches in your house. Definitely, cockroaches are among the hardest household pests to control. Different cockroach species (American, Oriental, and German roaches), have varied attractants. 

However, German roach are the most common household indoors roach. This is particularly attracted to water. Therefore, as an initial precautionary measure, you should reduce the number of exposed water sources in the house. 

In this article, I discuss various roach control methods you can use – these include appropriate food storage, preventing an infestation, and using professional roach killers. 

How to Kill Roaches in Your House (Step By Step)

Step 1: Use Glue Strips plus a Flashlight

First, determine the problematic sites in the house – those with adult roach infestation plus their eggs and babies.

Use a flashlight to search for the bugs in the regular roach spots in your house including closets, bathroom cabinets, closet door corners, shelf and cabinet crevices, under kitchen sink, and the refrigerator. 

Next, take your cockroach glue strips as this will help to determine if you have a massive roach infestation. So, considering the results from the flashlight inspection done earlier, choose the most strategic spots to locate the roach glue strips. 

Finally, continue inspecting the glue strips for 3-5 days. The glue strips that’ll have caught the highest number of roaches denote an areas that you should give the most intensive roach treatment.

Step 2: Use Bait Stations or Gel Bait

Roach baits will effectively control roaches in your indoor spaces. These solutions area made from insecticides and simple poisons. However, bait stations only operate to attract the bug to the bait poison that you’ve laid down.

Most of these baits have a secondary kill effect. Therefore, once the roach feed on the poison, they’ll travel back to their nests where they’ll dies and be fed upon by other cockroaches – hence poisoning them too. 

However, some of the bait stations or motels traps roaches using glue (which lacks secondary kill effect) as opposed to having poison or insecticide baits. In addition, the bait stations are unattractive when scattered in the house and they won’t kill the whole roach population. 

Next, I recommend you take an appropriate gel bait – these are mainly in the tube form. You can apply the gels in crevices and cracks or under baseboards. So, place them in such spots that you might attract many roaches. However, the downside of these poisonous gels is that you’ll end up with a flurry of dead roaches all over the house.

Step 3: Use Boric Acid Powder 

To effectively kill a large portion of the roach population, spread your boric acid over your sink, counter-tops, drawers, and cabinets in your kitchen. Don’t forget under the dishwasher, refrigerator, oven, and sink. 

Avoid inhaling this boric acid since it can be toxic. Therefore, it’ll be best to apply the boric acid during the night killing the roaches till dawn – at this time, humans and pets in the house will be asleep.

Boric acid is mainly used in the production of toothpaste and clothes detergent – and it’s also found in different cockroach killers. However, boric acid may also be swept off by air currents which could end up poisoning pets and kids.

Step 4: Fill up Crevices and Cracks with Caulk

The next step filling up those crevices and crack using caulk – this will prevent more roaches from hiding in these spaces and reproducing to generate a re-infestation. 

Definitely this method will be more effective, compared to traps and baits, against roaches trying to break into your house. Apply them on the spaces between entry holes and your tiles, walls. 

In addition to preventing a roach infestation, caulk fill-ups will protect you window and door seals against weather stripping. 

Conclusion 

Finally, you can now DIY your roach extermination in the house. Some of the method we’ve outlined above include using bait stations, roach gels, while also working towards safer food storage.

Additional methods I would recommend include reducing the number of water sources available around the houses. So, take these steps to prevent roaches from causing skin rashes, allergies, diarrhea, or food poisoning to you, your kids, or pets.