There are many openings in a home, these are a few of the ones we should be concerned with when it comes to pest control. The bugs inside your home come from somewhere. They come into your home from the outside.  Keeping bugs outside is a matter of excluding them by sealing all the potential inlets. What are these inlets? We list a few of them below:

Weep holes

Weep holes are brick mortar joints without the the mortar. There purpose is to provide ventilation and drainage for the area between the interior and exterior of the home. It is important to keep these holes from being blocked by dirt and debris. It is also important to keep mulch away from these openings. Note that this one has grass and debris inside.

Plumbing and electrical openings like the one pictured below, should be sealed. Insects and spiders can make their way through the smallest of openings and into your home. This one has an opening that a pencil could fit through.

Door and window casing cracks should be caulked or otherwise sealed periodically. If they are not sealed they will become a doorway for pests to come inside.

Vents like this soffit vent provide ventilation for our homes. The one pictured here is screened on the inside to prevent pests from using it to get into the home.

Communication cables like this television cable and phone cables provide another opportunity for insect invaders to attack.

Although rain gutters are not openings, they still have an effect on pests. Insects like to make homes in the gutters when they become full and clogged, and they will eventually make their way into your home. Clogged gutters will cause rot and rot leads to holes, and holes lead to invasion! This photo is a good argument for keeping trees trimmed away from the home.

For a more detailed list of what you can do to keep bugs out of your home see Bug Prevention in the Home or, Prevent Bugs At Home

How To Prevent Bugs At Home

Most of this sites pest prevention information focuses on the interaction of plant and animal life, how they work together, and how to prevent them from working together to prevent weeds and bugs at home and on your property. Sometimes it can be beneficial to break this down separately as well, so we want to talk about a single issue, how to prevent bugs at home. Our focus will narrow a little bit, but remember, that there is always interaction between bugs and weeds and brush and all the other factors on and adjacent to your home and property.

To prevent bugs at home, particularly to prevent bugs from coming into your home is a matter of exclusion. Making sure that they have no way to get inside is how it is done. We want to offer some suggestions on just how to do this.

Homes have openings.

Homes have openings. How well those openings are sealed, determines how well you can prevent bugs at home, and how many pests will get inside. This article will help you to find those week spots in your defenses, and strengthen your homes border against the invaders. The more attention to detail that you give at this stage, the less likely it will be that you have unwanted visitors!

It is a necessary fact of life. You have to breathe. Stop doing it for more than a couple of minutes, and you are a goner! Your home has to breathe too, and In order to breathe, in order to allow entry for pipes and cables, in order to vent heat and harmful gases, there have to be openings in a home.

The primary openings are:

Vents:

• Attic Vents: For dissipating heat.

• Soffit Vents: For dissipating heat.

• Plumbing Vents: For dissipating fumes and allowing the air needed for proper function of drainage systems.

• Range vents: For dissipating the heat and smoke from cooking.

• Hot gas vents for ventilating the hot gasses from gas hot water heaters.

• Dryer vents for dissipating the hot air from clothes dryers.

• Fan vents, for removing nuisance odors from bathrooms.

• Weep holes are small vents for allowing the drainage and drying of condensate from natural heating and cooling in the walls of your home, to prevent mold.

Other openings:

Power, communication, and transmission lines and pipes:

• Air Conditioning Condensate drains: Very often, these are small copper pipes through the walls of the home. These allow the removal of moisture from air conditioning units.

• Plumbing pipe openings: Allowing plumbing into your home; In most cases today, this is done through the floor of the concrete slab, but sometimes in other areas for homes on blocks or pier and beam construction.

• Electrical lines. To allow electricity transmission: These are most often at the upper portion of an outside wall.

• Cable communications lines: For satellite or cable line entry: The location can vary.

A home with out some forms of ventilation would soon destroy itself. A home without electricity, plumbing and communication would not be much fun!

So, how do we accommodate all these holes in our homes, and still keep little critters out? Well, that is what this is about.

How To Close The Border:

• Vents:

Before central heat and air, there were devices in homes to allow for the adjustment of temperature through the use of ventilation. We still have them in most homes today where they often serve as nothing more than vestiges of the ancient past. These were known as windows. Often the doors were used for the same purpose in the summer.

How did they manage to open these ventilation devices without allowing bugs in? This was accomplished through window and door screens. Taking a lesson from the past, we might consider the use of screens over the vents. Most home builders now screen vents, but there is always a chance, and you should check yours. Sometimes some are omitted by accident. I have seen a number of cases where rodents gained entry through dryer vents, and then chewed through the vent hose to get to the cheese and crackers. Write yourself a note to periodically check these vent screens for clogging.

• Other openings:

For other entry routes into the home, pipes and cables, will need to be sealed using another ancient technology: Caulk. A tube of high quality caulk is one of the best tools in home pest prevention. Seal around those entries on the outside of your home. Even the very small cracks and holes. You might be surprised just how small an insect or a rodent can become when it is hungry, thirsty, hot dry, wet or cold. When you are done with the outside of your home, you are not done!

On the inside of your house, you should do the same thing. Give special attention to plumbing drains. Very often a box was used to to form around the bathroom piping for the plumbers to make all the connections. If this area is not filled before the walls are completed, there will be exposed soil on the inside of the wall. Most pretreatments for termites will lower the chances of anything coming into the home through these openings, but occasionally some do. If you have easy access to these areas through a pipe chase, filling the area with mortar or some other hardening substance is a good option, if not, the first time that a repair is made to your plumbing requiring a plumber to open up a wall, you might be able to do it. Otherwise, make sure that the inside wall is sealed well.

• Caulking around doors and windows, inside and out should be checked, and resealed if needed.

• Door sweeps should be checked and replaced if they do not reach the floor, or do not go all the way to the edges of the door.

• All weather-stripping around doors and windows should be checked.

• All screen doors should be in good order with no holes. The same is true of window screens. Look for a good fit. Check the window surface to surface seals where they open, make sure the seal is tight enough that the bugs can’t crawl between.

To see some photographs of typical problem areas, see: Bugs | Stop Them From Coming Inside

What else can you do?

OK, now you know how to prevent bugs at home, what else can you do? A lot! The more pests you stop from coming into your lawn, the more you can stop from coming into your home. If you stop them before they get to your lawn, you raise your chances of winning even more. Check out Prevention Starts Outdoors to get started, and don’t let pests get your best!