Pest Prevention: Steps Designers Can Take

For many people dealing with pest prevention is simply something that happens every year. It’s a never-ending battle to keep the gaps blocked and the pests outside your home.

However, while calling the local exterminators will help you to eliminate the issue, it would be far better if your home was designed to prevent pest infiltration in the first place!

Designers can, and should, be incorporating pest prevention techniques into new designs. You can even incorporate some of these ideas into an existing home.

If you’re considering purchasing a new home, whether an environmentally friendly one or not, check to see if the developer has incorporated these pest prevention techniques:

Edging

Ask any pest control firm and you’ll quickly realize that the first hurdle for a pest is access. Insects and even mice can get through surprisingly small gaps. Mice and rats are also capable of chewing through a huge range of materials.

It’s important to consider this and take steps to prevent your home from being a target.

The first step is to add an edging to your home, at least 6” of concrete around your home, making it harder for a pest to get to the bottom of your home without being noticed.

This will also make it difficult for termites to get to the foundations of your home.

In addition, there should be no gaps or cracks around doors, windows, or anywhere along the baseline of the home. These let pests in and shouldn’t be present on a new build.

Building Stages

When your home is being built there will be times when it is left as a building site, allowing pests to move in before the home s finished. It’s up to developers to be vigilant monitoring for pests and removing any issues before the house is finished.

If a developer isn’t vigilant you can simply be creating a home with termites or mice living there before you!

Consider The Waste

It’s particularly important when designing and building multi-occupancy buildings to look at the waste infrastructure. Because lots of people will be dumping waste and they don’t all work to the same standards, you may find that rubbish bags are left lying around and pests can get into them.

Sealed waste areas are safest, preventing pests from gaining access.

Gap Control

People are becoming aware of how small a gap a pest can get through. However, most of the focus is on the outside of the home and not how a pest can move around if they’re inside your home.

Take a look at all the gaps in your walls, where plumbing pipes or electric cables go into walls and there is space around them. In theory, this allows more pipes to be run. In practice it gives an interior set of walkways to your pests, allowing them to effortlessly get around your home.

The developer and builder should ensure all of these are sealed during the building process.

The Garden

It’s also important to make sure that there are no plants or trees overhanging the property, these are another access point for pests.

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