As long as our technician is made aware that there is a cat or dog on site he will take steps to ensure your beloved pet is kept safe.

Gone are the days of spraying potentially harmful products inside your kitchen cupboards, these days we use a much more targeted approach for cockroaches by treating cracks and crevices and gel baiting inside your cupboards.

Think of the residual insecticide as a bit like paint, provided the product gets a chance to dry it will adhere to the surface, the products we use are designed to endure typical weather conditions and will NOT get rinsed off by the first rain event. However, if the surface is already wet or it rains before it gets a chance to dry it can affect the treatment. Our Technician will assess the conditions at the time of the treatment and reschedule the external work if need be. This is also the reason we offer a 6 month free service period with our full general pest treatments to give you the confidence that we stand by our treatments.

The products we use are recognised as the safest on the market. However, having said that they are still a chemical and should be treated as such. So, using them the way they should be used, they are considered very safe to be used in and around domestic homes. These products are even registered for use in child care centres and nursing homes. Yours and our health is our highest priority, especially considering we use these products virtually all day every day.

It is strongly recommended, however if you prefer to stay home while we are there we also understand this. We just ask that you are out of the room while we are treating. The easiest way is for you to stay inside while we treat the outside and then plonk yourself down in a chair outside when we do the inside. We do however insist that if there are young children at home that they vacate for a few hours. Telling a child not to touch something until it dries is like putting a plate of food in front of me and saying don’t pick!

Every house and every client is different. We have clients that don’t want to see a single living thing and we treat their houses inside and out every six months. We also have clients that just want to keep their pest population in check and get their house treated every 2-3 years. But the majority of our clients get it done annually with the option of getting just the externals redone mid-year due to our high rainfall.

The term “natural” is used a bit misleadingly in the pest management industry. A very popular and common group of insecticides referred to as “pyrethroids” are based upon the naturally occurring insecticide “pyrethrum” which is produced by chrysanthemum daisies. The problem is pyrethrum is essentially non-residual, and provides no long-term control, therefore these pyrethroids have been synthetically modified to provide residual protection against insect pests whilst still maintaining that low toxicity of pyrethrum. So technically synthetic pyrethroids are not natural products however some pest control companies do like to exploit their naturally occurring origin to have you believe that they use safer products than everybody else. There seems to be an assumption that “natural means safe” when in fact some of the most toxic products on the planet are naturally occurring substances. Arsenic is a perfect example of an extremely toxic natural by-product whereas a lot of the synthetic pyrethroids are even less toxic than the natural form of pyrethrum.

Do not disturb them anymore. Termites are very shy creatures and when disturbed will often retreat only to attack somewhere else in your home. For us to be able to treat termites we need to have active termites to be able to treat. Treating termites is also a numbers game, the more termites we can treat the more successful the treatment is likely to be.  So, if possible tape up the damaged area using cloth or duct tape, you can even use cardboard for large openings. And then contact our office as soon as possible, but don’t panic termites are not going to eat your home overnight! Spraying termites yourself is the worst thing you can do, killing termites you can see is easy, killing termites you cant see is the tricky part and that is where we come into action.

Pressure washing is designed to clean surfaces back to their original condition, and this of course can remove any residual insecticide we have applied. It is therefore best to organise your pressure washing to take place before your next treatment.

The first time you mop, or vacuum will not remove the product completely, but it will gradually remove the product each time you do. Therefore, we do ask that you avoid mopping the edges of your floors at least for a couple of weeks. That way we are hitting any pest activity in your home at full strength and speeding up that control process for you. Go for your life in the middle of the floors, and feel free to sweep if needed, just don’t mop the edges for a while!

A normal general pest treatment is an internal/external treatment including the roof space. But we essentially target our treatment to areas which will maximise the products exposure to the pest but are also safe to do so. These areas typically include skirtings, cornices, beneath and behind fridges and dishwashers, edges of the building, edges of footpaths, subfloors, garden edges, fence railings, around windows and behind downpipes, beneath carports and pergolas just to name the main areas. Our technician will discuss with you on the day in more detail and address any questions or concerns you may have.

Unfortunately, the pests will not disappear overnight, and they don’t just simply hit the product and die on impact, we need to allow time for the pests to come into contact with the product and for the product to actually work on the pest. For this reason, we normally say if you can please just tolerate any pest activity you might see over the next 3-4 weeks to give the treatment a chance to do its thing. Having said that though if at any stage after this but within our free service period we have offered you, you feel the treatment isn’t working as good as you expected, or it has previously please feel free to give us a call.

Yes, as much as we would love an invisible forcefield around our house which would stop every creepy crawly in its tracks, pest treatments don’t work that way unfortunately. Insects don’t just simply hit the treated zone and die on impact or get repelled away, they have to track across the treatment first, picking up tiny traces of the product and then crawling off to die some 24hrs later. The aim of the treatment is to stop pests from taking up residence and multiplying in your home. You often see good evidence of this when you clean out your garage and you find a myriad of dead spiders and cockroaches behind all the stored goods. These are critters that have wandered into your home and have been controlled by the treatment without you even knowing. If however you feel you are seeing more than the occasional pest then please give us a call, we can’t fix a problem unless we know there is a problem.

Unfortunately trapping rats tends to only trap the young and dumb individuals and is a very long and tedious process which in turn costs you. The baits we use are designed to have a gradual effect on the rodents, most animals when they feel unwell, feel uncomfortable and get the wanders, once out of the building they get disorientated and die elsewhere. The reality is however that 80-90% will die elsewhere and 10-20% may die within your roof space. So, it depends on the size of the rat population in your roof, if you have just one or two rats living in your roof, you would be unlucky to get a casualty, however if you have 10-20 rats living in your roof chances are you are going to get a casualty in your roof. But with 10 or 20 rats living in your roof you are going to have bigger concerns than the chance of a carcass in your roof.

Rat bait is extremely toxic to dogs therefore whenever we bait outside of the roof we always ensure the bait is secured inside tamper resistant stations which are designed to prevent kids and pets from accessing the bait. For a dog to suffer secondary poisoning from consuming a poisoned rat it would have to consume multiple poisoned rats, so although it is theoretically possible it is very unlikely.  Dogs cannot get secondary rat bait poisoning from simply licking or mouthing a carcass. Laguna Pest Control has never had a dog poisoning incident and we would like to keep it that way!

We typically advise you to allow 1-2 weeks to gain control of the rat population, the reason being is we need to allow time for the rats to find the bait and then for the bait to actually work. We even sometimes hear an increase in noise after we have baited due to rats fighting over the bait and sick rats getting chased out by other healthier rats.

Although termite management systems or termite “barriers” significantly reduce the risk of termite attack they are not 100% foolproof. Termite management systems, in particular physical systems, are designed to prevent concealed entry, which means the visual inspection zone needs to be regularly checked for termites bridging these zones. Although most of the termite management products we use are very effective, some products such as steel sheeting or mesh are very difficult products to work with, so it does also depend on how skilled the installer was. And unfortunately due to most of the system being concealed within the buildings walls it is impossible to know how well it was installed or if had been accidently damaged during the construction process, we regularly see “barriers” breached by plumbing or electrical services. The idea of regular termite inspections is to detect termites at an early stage before they cause significant damage. It is also a great opportunity to detect conducive conditions at an early stage and also just to make sure you haven’t accidently compromised your termite management system by building on decks, pergolas or even building garden beds against your home. Remember your home is often your biggest asset and your termite management system along with regular inspections are the only way to protect this asset.

Not really. The reason being unlike ants and cockroaches, termites don’t simply walk around on the surface. Termites instead tunnel through the soil, so simply spraying around on the ground has very limited control against termites. To effectively deter termites, we need to create what is referred to as a soil treated zone or “barrier”, which is essentially that soil abutting your home and down to your footings. Creating a soil treated zone often involves, trenching and treating, removing pavers and even drilling and injecting through concrete paving. So, as you can imagine this is quite a task, thus we need to use products and volumes that will last typically 5-10 years.