Coming Back to Your Florida Home After Summer? What to Check in the First 48 Hours

Coming back to your Florida home after summer, the first thing most people want to do is drop the bags and crank the AC. Give it twenty minutes first. Before you unpack, walk the house and look for four things: dry drains, droppings, roach activity in the kitchen and bathrooms, and water sitting outside. Your house just spent the busiest pest months of the year shut up, hot and undisturbed. Catching the signs on day one keeps a small problem small.

The first hour, room by room

Grab your phone flashlight. You're not cleaning yet, just looking.

Kitchen. Open the cabinet under the sink and check the back corners and the spots where the pipes come through the wall. Pull out the drawer under the oven if you have one. Look along the edge of the fridge and in the pantry, especially at anything in paper or cardboard. Roach droppings look like ground pepper or tiny dark smears. An egg case is a small brown capsule, roughly the size of a grain of rice.

Bathrooms, especially the guest bath. This is the one nobody touched since spring. A big roach on its back in the tub is a classic welcome-home sight. Tiny gray flies hovering over the sink are usually drain flies, and they point straight at a dry or dirty drain.

Garage. Rodents run along walls, so check where the floor meets the wall, behind stored boxes and around any bag of birdseed or pet food. Chewed corners on bags and a musty smell are the giveaways.

AC closet and attic hatch. The air handler closet stays damp from condensation, which makes it a water stop for pests. Then pop the attic hatch and shine the light around. Flattened or torn insulation, droppings and chewed duct wrap or wiring mean something's been living up there.

Lanai and eaves. Look for webs in the corners, wasp nests under the eaves or inside shutter tracks, and water sitting in saucers, planters and pool covers. If you find a wasp nest, leave it alone and call us; nest removal is part of what we do. If it's honey bees, call a local beekeeper instead; we don't remove hives.

What the droppings are telling you

Roach droppings are small, like pepper, and you'll find them in cabinet corners, hinges and drawer tracks. Rodent droppings are bigger, pellet-shaped and usually show up in a line along a wall, in the garage, the attic or behind the fridge.

Don't sweep or vacuum rodent droppings; that stirs up dust you don't want to breathe. Open doors and windows and let the space air out for 30 minutes first. Put on rubber, latex or vinyl gloves, spray the droppings with a household disinfectant or a bleach solution (1 part bleach to 10 parts water) until they're soaked, and let it sit 5 minutes. Wipe them up with paper towels, bag them and put the bag in a covered outdoor trash can. Then disinfect the spot, and wash your hands after you take off the gloves. If there are a lot of droppings, like throughout attic insulation, call us before you start.

If it's rodents, call before you start setting out your own bait. We inspect for entry points, set traps and tamper-resistant bait stations, and seal the gaps rodents are using with exclusion work, to help keep them from getting back in. Inside the home we use snap traps only, never loose bait. Bait stations stay outside. More on our rodent control page.

When coming back to your Florida home after summer means a call

One big roach in the tub after months away is normal for South Florida. These are worth a call:

• Roaches in more than one room, or more than a couple in the first day
• Small, light-brown roaches in the kitchen, which usually means they're breeding inside
• Rodent droppings anywhere, or scratching in the attic or walls at night
• Drain flies that keep showing up after you've run the water

Big outdoor roaches are often palmetto bugs that came in from the yard or the drains. Our pest control service starts with a FREE inspection, and new customers get $50 off the first service.