How to prevent pests

Prevention is often the best form of defence when it comes to pests. Preventative pest control can stop an infestation before it begins, ensuring you don’t have to share your home or business premises with creatures such as mice, rats, cockroaches, ants or birds. At Topline, we can suggest a range of highly effective preventative pest control methods, some of which you can do yourself without outside help. Keep reading to find out how to prevent pests on your property. 

5 steps for pest prevention

Whether it’s filling up those cracks and holes in your brickwork or washing up after each meal, preventative pest control can help to keep pests at bay. Stopping pests from setting up home in your property comes with a range of benefits. Not only will it mean you don’t have rodents and insects damaging your property or putting your health at risk, but avoiding a full-scale infestation can also save you a considerable amount of money. Read on to learn how to prevent pests from infesting your home or business premises.

Seal up access points

Pest infestations can occur when pests find a way to get into your home or business premises. Cracks in the exterior of the building and improperly sealed doorways are common access points for pests. 

Add a door sweep or weatherstripping to doorways

Is the distance between the bottom of your door and the threshold more than ¼ inch? If so, a mouse could easily get in, let alone smaller pests. We recommend adding a door sweep to limit the space for pests to get through. A door sweeps essentially acts like a filter that blocks the gap between the door and the wall. You could also add weatherstripping or door-sealing materials to provide added protection. 

Identify and seal cracks in your building’s exterior 

Pests can easily find their way through cracks and holes in your property. These cracks can often be found in areas around doors and windows – particularly in the corners, places where pipes and wires enter the building, porches and stoops, and between the screed at the bottom of the house and the wall. Perform regular interior and exterior inspections of your property in order to check for cracks or holes. Patch up any openings as soon as you find them. Not only will this help to keep pests out, but it will prevent the cracks from getting worse over time. This can remove the need for expensive repairs in the future.

Regularly dispose of rubbish

One of the simplest things you can do to prevent pests on your property is to dispose of rubbish regularly. Pests love your rubbish bins, often viewing them as an all-you-can-eat buffet. However, by removing rubbish from your home at the end of the day, you can make your living space a less attractive place for them. Keeping the rubbish in your large waste bin outside will minimise the risk of pests coming into your property.

Store food in secure containers 

Since pests are so keen to track down food sources, it’s important to store your food in secure containers. Pests are extremely good at finding food in your home, with ants, in particular, having unique skills to allow them to do this. They have around five times as many odour receptors as other bugs, which helps them to smell food from a significant distance away. By using securely sealed containers, you can block the smell of foods, making it less likely that they will attract pests.

Deep clean your property

When it comes to preventing pests on your property, regular deep cleaning is essential. Every so often, we recommend wiping, mopping and vacuuming every corner of the building. This will eliminate most of the sources of infestation and the sustenance that keeps pests thriving and allows them to survive long enough to multiply. Beyond getting rid of crumbs on the kitchen floor, you can also identify key breeding grounds for pests. You could find small flies thriving and multiplying in neglected drains. In this case, you could use a drain cleaner to eliminate them.

Assess your landscaping 

Even though pests are more likely to be a major problem inside your house, we don’t recommend letting them hang around outside it either. Inspect your landscaping carefully for pests and for things that could attract them to your property, for example, woodpiles, dirty gutters, and long grass. Carrying out regular maintenance to the exterior of your property can help to limit the presence of pests. Keep in mind that pests can do some serious to your home or business from outside if they’re not dealt with quickly.

Pest control in Doncaster

Preventative pest control methods can help to reduce the risk of infestation on your property. However, even if you try everything possible to stop them from getting into your home or business premises, sometimes this isn’t possible. If sharing your property with mice, rats, ants, cockroaches, bed bugs or fleas isn’t your idea of fun, it makes sense to get in touch with Topline today. At Topline Pest Control in Doncaster, we use a variety of methods to remove pests of all kinds from our clients’ properties. We’ve built up a great reputation across South Yorkshire over the years, becoming renowned for our eliminating pests effectively, ethically and safely. 

Contact us 

If you’re still not sure how to prevent pests, why not get advice from our team? Call us on 01302 969049 to talk to one of our extremely knowledgeable pest controllers. Alternatively, send us a message via the website and we will get back to you as soon as we can. We’re on hand to provide specialist pest control in Doncaster at highly competitive prices.