Straight answers · Pests in UK homes
Pests gone.
For damn good.
You have seen something in the kitchen and every search result wants to send someone round. Here you find out what you are actually looking at. How it got in, and how it keeps getting in. And what deals with that instead of just killing what you can see.
- What it actually is
- What gets rid of it
- What it should cost
Start with what you can see
9 in-depth guides, and counting
Silverfish, and the second species nobody tells you about
The common silverfish cannot lay eggs unless it is damp, so drying the room out ends it. That advice is on every page about them, and it stopped being the whole answer in 2014.
Read it →House spiders, false widows, and what actually bites in Britain
Hospital admissions for spider bites in England have doubled in a decade. They went from 47 a year to 100. Both of those facts are true at once.
Read it →Woodlice indoors are a damp reading, not an infestation
They cannot breed in your house and they cannot survive a dry room. Both are the reason a woodlice spray is usually money for nothing.
Read it →A wasp nest, and whether it is actually your problem
A UK wasp nest dies over winter and is never used again. That turns the question from how to kill it into how close it is to you.
Read it →The moths you can see are not the ones eating your jumper
Adult clothes moths have no working mouthparts and eat nothing at all, which is why spraying the flying ones changes nothing.
Read it →Flying ant day is not a day, and you do not need to buy anything
The largest study done on this found flying ants on as many as 96% of days across the summer. There is no single date and nothing to treat.
Read it →Mice, and the 6mm gap that is doing all the work
A house mouse gets through a gap about the width of a pencil.
Read it →A rat in the garden is a different problem from a rat in the house
Outdoors it is food and shelter, and the animal may be living three hundred metres away on somebody else's land. Indoors it is a hole in your building.
Read it →Who is responsible for pest control: you, the landlord, the freeholder or the council
Most people arrive at this question assuming they are the one paying. In a rented home they usually should not be, and four separate pieces of law can say so.
Read it →No callout to sell you.
Nearly everything written about pests in this country comes from someone who wants to come and do the work. Here you get the answers I would give you over the fence. What you have actually got. How it is getting in. And what I would do about it if it were my house.
Nobody pays for the verdicts
No pest-control firm owns this site, and nothing here is a paid-for opinion. When a treatment is the wrong answer to your problem, or when the job is a bag of wire wool rather than a contract, the page says so. If a recommendation ever earns me anything, the page discloses it plainly, right where it sits.
The way in, first
Every answer starts with the same question. How are they getting in? Kill what you can see and leave the gap open and they are back by autumn. Only now you have paid for it twice.
No waffle
Short answers first, the why underneath. You leave every page knowing what to do next, not with ten tabs open.
The questions everyone asks
Not to you. They do not bite and are not known to carry disease. The things at risk are paper and starch, so a box of documents in a damp cupboard is in more danger than you are.
Hardly ever. Around 650 spider species live in the UK, twelve have been known to bite people, and none living here is deadly. The ones that can bite do it defensively, when they are trapped against skin.
Not sound timber. They eat material that is already rotting, so they turn up where wood has gone soft rather than being the reason it did. Finding them on a joist is a moisture finding, not a pest one.
Somewhere damp and close, with something starchy in it. They breed inside the building rather than wandering in from the garden, and the food anchors them more reliably than the water does.
Usually of damp, yes. They breathe through gills and die of water loss in a dry room, so a population living happily indoors is telling you that room is not dry. They also do not breed indoors, which means every one you see walked in from outside.
Fewer insects and fewer gaps. A house with a lot of spiders in it is a house with a lot of insects in it, because that is what they came for. Outside lighting near doors and windows is the biggest single lever most people have, and it beats anything you could spray.
They were already there. Males of many species mature in autumn and start walking about looking for a mate, so what changes is not how many spiders you have but how many are moving.
See all questions, or got one that is not here? send it over and the useful ones get a proper page.