Episode: 3115
Title: HPR3115: Pest Control
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3115/hpr3115.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 17:06:59

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3, 115 for Friday 10 July 2020.
Today's show is entitled Pest Control. It is hosted by Operator and is about 38 minutes long
and carries an explicit flag. The summary is. Talk about Pest Control.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15. That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
Today I am your host Operator, also known as Robert McCurdy.
We've got a live one for you today or shall I say a dead one, dead jokes.
We're talking about bugs and it is the season to be smacking yourself in the face and the legs
because it's mosquito season here in the southeast.
So we're going to be talking about bugs and pests and mainly mosquitoes and roaches
or as they call them the palmetto bugs, the giant freaking ones.
So a little backstory. We had issues with mosquitoes.
We couldn't go outside. We couldn't do anything. We're here in Southeast as well as Tablet's Neighborhood.
And I'll get into all that old neighborhood.
Very wooded backyard and lots of neighbors with old wooded backyard.
Anyways, really bad mosquitoes when we moved in.
And we got a guy on Craigslist, not Craigslist.
What's the coupon thing? Coupon, I'm kind of becoming him.
Whatever it is. Groupon. And he came by for $80 and sprayed our house externally.
And my wife said he was out there like flailing around and going crazy because it was literally swarms of mosquitoes.
They had, I think, gotten around the gutters, which I still haven't fixed.
But I've managed to kind of limit the amount of reproduction going on there.
But I'll talk about that later. So it kind of started from that.
And then it's kind of moved into mosquitoes and last year was the worst year for the palmetto bugs in my life.
We had them crawling on me. We had them crawling on my wife. We had them crawling on me multiple times.
I think last year I had one crawling on my face while I was half awake going to sleep.
So anyways, we didn't call professionals obviously.
So I have a kind of tell you about my setup. So go quick and do it. Sorry about the keyboard.
So first we started off with a non-B safe one that was called Bifton or Bifton IT.
It was a white milky. That one was for indoor.
And we used it. I used it outdoor along with the Estrinza.
Estrin, Estrinna. I see three for outdoors. And I'll put this in the show notes.
So anyways, I went and looked at what products the guy used when he did our house.
And I basically reproduced that. And then I did some more research around other stuff.
I've always had Delta dust for cracks and stuff like that. And I'll kind of go into that.
So the setup is I have a blower backpack blower that has a Mr. Fager on it.
And a pump based hand pump, pump sprayer, little deal that I don't use as much.
But I do use it every 90 days or so inside the house.
I have a steel SR450 backpack sprayer that has that carries roughly 3.5 gallons.
It's like 10 liters. So I'll put all the definitions and how much I put in of what.
But the Bifton, it was a fair amount. It was like four ounces anywhere from like two to four ounces per 3.5 gallons.
And then 0.5 of the new stuff that's supposed to be B friendly.
And you're not really supposed to use any pesticides at all.
But the stuff that's in the Bifton IT is like like got that neural toxin that like takes the bees take it back to the nest.
And the queen gets infected and then they all die.
So try to stay away from and make sure you have somewhat be safe.
Pesticide if you're going to get into this.
What I would say is just do your research.
If you start seeing the same name come up good, bad, you know, you know what to look for.
There's a bunch of, you know, DIY pest control or whatever.
There's a bunch of those websites out there.
So what I'll say is I'll get less into the to the setup and more into the like experiences and the know how and the things you can learn and understand.
And things that you won't see really online unless you do a lot of digging.
So I've got the tank. I've got the chemicals.
I've been doing it for, you know, probably three years now, three or four years now.
I think the first year I did it, we had a fair amount of success.
But, you know, every year it's a battle, you know, it's a pain to have to go out and spray.
And then you have to get the pump and spray it in.
And of course it, it stinks.
So you have to, you know, make sure you're wearing protective gear.
And I, I protection and I actually had in 95 masks before all this crap went to shit.
I had tons of a whole box full of in 95 masks that I was using for that.
So I went through all that.
Let's say as far as technique goes, you can find a lot of techniques online.
I'm not going to bore you with that stuff.
I'm going to look through my notes here.
I do 30 to 90 days.
Now when it's hit season, I'll do it every 30 days.
And I've done it multiple times within two weeks.
I wouldn't spray any more than every two weeks.
Because if you're spraying more than every two weeks, then something else is going on.
You're not hitting the right spot.
And that's what I kind of learned.
I hopefully I learned this year.
Because you have to hunt.
You have to hunt for this stuff.
You have to tear stuff apart.
You have to look at your house, inside it out, and understand how the pests are getting in your house.
You can't just spray and hope for the best.
If you have an infestation or if you have a brick or a place in your house that they're breeding,
then there's no, there's no winning.
Unless you're accomplishing the goal of attacking where they live and where they breathe,
then there's no point in spraying because they're just going to come out when they feel like coming out.
And they also do a just over time from what I've heard.
So if you have, you know, if he's spray for three years, sometimes they suggest switching the chemicals out,
you know, if you're not getting a lot of success.
So I'm kind of shooting off the hit.
I have made some notes for some other folks that were asking or had some questions about it.
So I'm using the Bee Friendly stuff, Maverick Premiere, Permit Firmator, and for Indoor and Outdoor, I think.
You don't want to get the bad for Bee's stuff.
The Delta Dust, I don't have the little, so this Delta Dust is basically like a powder that you're supposed to take a bumper,
a special thing to shove it in a hole, and then what I do is I just shake it up,
and then I shove the nozzle in the hole and then squeeze, and that kind of sort of works.
Sometimes you end up making a big mess and then pushing, you know, like straight media out onto the ground.
But that stuff lasted a long time.
Really good for ants.
So like if you have them in the kitchen or any wet areas, if they're good for the kitchen area or like under sinks and stuff,
obviously you don't want to get any of the stuff near any food or food items.
So be careful when you're spraying the cabinets.
Otherwise that if you're spraying under a cabinet or spraying under something, that Delta Dust goes everywhere.
I mean it goes everywhere. You're supposed to be wearing probably a mask.
I wear a mask when I do it because it's a dust, and you're going to get it everywhere.
So I actually sprayed under behind our, I want to try breathing better, behind our dishwasher.
So our dishwasher had a space avoid behind it.
We had an addition, and basically they kind of didn't really do the foundation right for the addition.
So behind the, behind the dishwasher, there is like kind of a void, and there's just like dirt.
And it's like there's a little place where there's just kind of dirt, and I don't know why or how,
but that's how the ants got in.
Anyways, I sub the, the Delta Dust back there, and I shake it up, and I go behind the,
go behind the dishwasher and get all clean up.
And I realized that basically on the other side of the dishwasher, there's no board that separates the,
the dishwasher from the under the sink or under the kitchen table, not table, but the kitchen counter.
So under the kitchen counter, between the washing machine or the dishwasher and the stuff under the counter to the kitchen counter,
there's nothing separate that.
So when I stood the Delta Dust, I opened the door on the other side, and just like put Delta Dust all over all these,
you know, kitchen utensils and appliances and bowls and stuff.
So gets everywhere, you obviously don't want to ingest it.
That's really good stuff is the Delta Dust.
What else can I say about Delta Dust?
Good for ants, good for, you know, if there's a, you know, you have an ant pile or you know where ants are coming from,
you can just Delta Dust the whole line there outside, and it's good for like concentrated areas.
Other than that, that's pretty much it for Delta Dust.
Let me look kind of what else we got here.
Oh yeah, we had, we bought the Sininta Avion Cockroach Gel Beat, and kind of through it on, you get a bunch of pieces of paper,
index cards or something, and you put the, you know, like a little, I don't know, pea sized amount on the index paper,
and then you can just kind of throw all behind stuff.
You know, you have your road straps and all that, and they can get expensive if you're buying them and packs or whatever.
But the gel bait comes with like four, three or four syringes, I think, two or three or four syringes.
It's plenty.
And you just put it on index card and throw a behind some.
And it's a lot easier to use because you can get behind stuff and just throw a behind there instead of having to like spray behind something or
get your arm behind something or whatever.
You can basically just throw it up somewhere or throw it on top of something.
If you have a void that you know, you know, pest might get into.
You can just like throw a few down inside the void on the index cards.
They work great in that way.
I will say, I don't know if anything's, if it's effective.
Because, you know, you're only supposed to use it if you actually have a pest problem.
You're not supposed to use it if you don't have a pest problem because it's a bait.
So if you're baiting it, then you need to have pest debate.
If you put the bait out and you don't have pests like as a preemptive thing, a precautionary, a preemptive thing, you don't want to do that.
Unless you actually start seeing pests or you think you have, you know, issues.
That's the only thing I've seen about that stuff.
And again, I haven't done a whole ton of research.
Not the amount I should be doing.
I'll read about a thing and then I'll buy a product and then I'll just kind of use it.
So I'm not claiming to be an expert in any of this.
I'm not licensed to do any of this.
In some states, you have to be licensed.
So I'm not an expert.
I'm not saying any of this stuff.
This is all just, you know, me exploring things myself.
Let's see what else we got.
I got the sprayer.
It's an SR 450.
You can get them not on discount.
You can get them used.
You can get them refurbished.
You can get them like refurbished used from somewhere.
But it's like the steel brand, the nice brands, the nice products, the nice power tools.
They don't go on sale.
It's not like Home Depot where they like go on sale.
Like you're steel and you're whatever the other German one is.
They don't go on sale.
I waited like two years before I finally broke down and bought another one.
I got two, two used ones that someone gave me when they were moving out.
I actually refurbished both of them and took the better one and sold it for like 300 bucks.
I mean, these things aren't cheap.
But if you're doing outdoor, especially if you're going to do your neighbors,
you'll want to get the backpack sprayer and get the full blown deal.
What I do is I spray my house and I try to spray my neighbors for $20.
I wouldn't go any less than $20.
I would go maybe even start upping it to $30, maybe $40, $30.
I don't want to make any money, but the reason it's so expensive and it's just like anything else,
you're paying one for the expertise of that person to hunt for the infestations and hunt for the pest.
And two, you're paying for this guy to carry around a three and a half gallon thing of water of liquid on his back all day.
So after me walking to about three or four houses,
if I do our house and I do my three neighbors, one, two, three, and possibly four neighbors,
if I do a full round, I go through the 3.5 gallon and then I'll have a bunch left over,
I'll do like a half batch.
So it takes me about, I want to say, three, five, three, maybe four gallons of liquid to do,
one, two, three, one, one, two, three, four houses.
And I try to do all my neighbors, but not everybody is signed up, obviously.
But that's my idea is I kill everything around me and I don't have to worry about anything.
I just nuke everything around me, which hasn't turned out to be super beneficial in a lot of ways,
because we live near a creek and a river.
So there's not a whole lot that you can do.
They travel something like mosquitoes travel like something 16 miles or something ridiculous.
Anyways, let's get into some more interesting stuff.
Pump sprayer for indoors.
Suggest getting a nice tip, like a metal, nice metal tip.
I mean, I really haven't found what I really want from a sprayer.
What I want is a fine mist from like a Mr. Fogger perspective.
But a lot of the pump sprayers are just like a lot of liquid comes out.
And I don't know if that's the right amount or whatever, but what I would want is like a very fine mist coming out.
And you need a lot of pressure for that.
I think more than like a regular pump sprayer.
So I might look into doing some kind of mist-based application so that it's not just like drenching the inside of the house for the pump sprayer thing.
But I've been able to get the metal nozzle that I have.
It's just a metal whole nozzle.
It's not a wide vertical sprayer, whatever, a width spray.
It's a little nozzle.
And I've tried various things to like shove pieces of plastic or shove something in there to make it mist better, but really there's not not any better way to make it go.
So I do the base boards.
That's all I do.
Last year they were so bad I went in my attic and I removed anything that wasn't sealed in a plastic container.
So we took out insulation, we took out old boards, we took out cardboard especially.
Everything out of the, everything in the attic has to be either in a plastic sealed, very sealed container, not just like one of those crappy ones.
It's just like, the lid just sits on there.
It has to be a sealed container that a creature or pest can't get into.
But keep in mind, like even something like moths, they can get into the tiniest of crack.
I don't even know how to do it, but they can get into the tiniest of little cracks and lay their eggs in your rice.
And then you open up your rice and you got like moths on it and there's like rice eggs or whatever or moth eggs on your rice.
So they can get anywhere, they can stay anywhere.
That's pretty much it for like the inside stuff I'll say.
Do one level at a time and then have your family transition once the one places dry.
Wait, I like to wait for the product to dry and then I'll tell them to go upstairs and then I'll spray downstairs.
You know, I'm kind of super conscious.
You see videos of people like legit just spraying pesticides like on their couch and on the floor.
I don't like that.
You know, I think doing the baseboards is good and spraying behind and under things where there's not traffic and where there's not people touching stuff.
You know, it's just the whole chemical thing.
I don't like, but you got to you got to draw a line at some point.
I'll say that about the inside.
I knew you can twist the sprayer so it just sprays like a stream almost and I sprayed the whole entire attic.
I later found out that we had a leak in one of the toilets and that's one of the reasons why we had tons of roaches because one of the toilets upstairs was leaking.
So that got rid of a bunch of them.
And just a couple of weeks ago, I was going to check the, I was doing some housework and I wanted to check the space above our garage for moisture damage or any damage of moisture.
And I went up there and well, and behold, it was a, a sea of cockroach eggs of roach eggs.
So that's pretty much, I feel like that's pretty much where our infestation was because I was spraying, you know, sometimes once every two weeks indoors.
And I was spraying outdoor and I just couldn't, I couldn't get rid of it.
So I'm hoping this year, I've left an entry point into that space above the garage.
It was sealed off, but it was bad. I mean, it was, it was an infestation basically.
I don't know if, I would call it an infestation, but it was, they were comfortably living.
There was like roaches all over the place in there.
In our bedroom, unfortunately, our bed is on the other side of the worst part of the infestation in that area.
So, you know, we had them, we had them crawling around in there and I couldn't figure it out because our bathroom is separate basically an entire room away from our living space, our sleeping space.
So it's like, they would have had to have come all the way from the bathroom and to be over here in our space.
And that's not the case. Basically right on the other side of the light switch, right on the other side of the light socket is like probably the most concentration of roach eggs I've ever seen in my life.
I was on the other side of it. So hopefully this year, I can stay on top of the attic, I can stay on top of the space above the garage.
And that's again, back to the point of, if you can't hunt around and you can't find the moisture, it's about water, right?
It's about moisture, it's about water, it's about warm living spaces for them to crawl into.
We're really clean. I would say we're a pretty clean shop. I mean, we are kind of minimalist, we don't have a bunch of junk crap laying around.
We clean our house. Well, I double clean the house every week, but I contribute to cleaning the house every week.
You know, we don't really have, you know, messy children or dogs or we have a cat, but that doesn't seem to be an issue.
So, you know, if we got infested with just us living a relatively normal clean existence, anybody can kind of get infested.
And I'll say everybody in the neighborhood, the forums were posting about it. They were really bad news there because we did not have a cold.
We had no cold last the year before. We didn't have any cold this year. So this year is going to be another year for the roaches or for the insects.
And I also feel like that it happens to be a the year of or the season of X.
This season, last season definitely was a season of roaches, but it seems like one particular bug will kind of take over.
And it makes sense because the way the weather works, sometimes it cools down sooner.
Sometimes it cools down faster or sometimes it heats up faster or sometimes it heats up slower or or later.
And that affects, you know, the cycle of different bugs and when they lay their eggs and all that crap.
So, some years we've had like a little bit more of one particular bug or the other, but for me it's the deal breaker is the roaches, the big big or any roach.
But we had the big palm out of bugs and then the other one is the mosquitoes and with the mosquitoes down here in the South, man, there's nothing you do.
I have all the products I bought. The 3M has this fancy chemical called like my mocks and my locks.
It's like a little little thing you put on your hip and it has a fan and it's just a tiny tiny amount of whatever this chemical is and it's supposed to make the mosquitoes go away.
Your citronella, nope, your, now one that I think is actually fairly effective is the ones that these hunters use.
And I don't have a link to it and I don't feel like putting it in the show notes.
It's shaped a bit like a triangle. I don't know. It's like a little thing you put around your hip or whatever.
Anyways, it's like a belt clip or something.
You'll notice it's hunters use it. It comes with butane and then these little squares that you buy and they're not none of this stuff is cheap, it's ridiculously expensive.
These little squares and you heat it up and get it hot and then it smokes and that smoke either smokes them out or whatever.
I think that one feels the most effective but here in the South with our neighbors is nothing you do.
So, as far as like non-pest, just throw it on the trash.
You know, if you like the citronella thing, whatever. I've got four citronella torches that I use.
I bought the metal ones and a steel home Depot sells like a steel rod that's like a size of the bit of the torches.
Because the little poles that they sell you at the store are either kind of expensive to replace and be like if you get a different one they don't match.
And you like it won't fit on there properly or whatever or it'll bend or break.
The ones that I like are just it's just a giant screw rod and you miss a giant screw rod and then I just nail it into the ground and I screw the torches on top of it.
So I've got two or three of those.
But all that crap is just garbage.
We actually bought like a mosquito trap thing and it was like you plug it in and it's got the zapper thing in it's a fan and it sucks them in the fan.
And you know, they go into this little reservoir and it's got these little spinning black and white things and it's like all this fucking a key bullshit.
None of that work. Nothing, not even one book. I think like a like a big got stuck on there. Some shit and died.
Like it was just complete garbage. All that stuff. It's all garbage. The only thing you can do.
Now I've seen some methods as far as whole house control.
What I what I would ideally want to do is you put up a you run a line across your house like the kind of like irrigation line, but it would have to be, you know, it would have to be not residential grade.
Not residential grade. You have to be commercial grade. But you put like a commercial grade mister on the ends of your roof.
And then you plug that into a reservoir that has your bug chemicals in it.
And then you plug that into the water and then you plug that into a timer.
And then you have automatic, you know, around your house pest control, which would be super awesome.
Because I wouldn't have to necessarily spray all that often. I just had to turn the mister on and it would like missed for like 15 minutes or whatever.
And like rain, bugs right around all of my house and you could even it could even travel as far as, you know, outside of our already hard type of thing.
But that's, you know, expensive to set up and I don't really have the time for that type of project yet.
Let's see what else we got. I know I'm kind of jumping all over a place and it's not super linear.
Because I'm kind of talking off the hip of what of my experience is based on what I've done.
What else will I say about kind of indoor? I covered pretty good.
You got to hunt out the places that they're feeding and breeding.
Ants are really easy. You just wait for them to infest and then you follow the trail.
So if you have a few ants, don't bother spraying. If you have a few more ants, don't bother spraying.
When you want to do your control is when you've been completely infested.
And at one point in time, we had ants and then I left lemon meringue in the sink.
And man, I woke up at like three o'clock in the morning and went downstairs.
And it was like a solid black blob in the middle of the sink.
Because that meringue, man, they just crap out of that meringue.
Anyways, so then you just trace the line and see where they're going.
And then, you know, three months later or like three weeks later, they can still know that scent.
They still know foods there and they'll come in from a different direction.
So they started coming into the garage. So I had to seal off the garage.
I had to seal up the door jam for the garage and make sure, you know, use that spray foam to seal everything up.
The spray foam stuff is effective against pests, but not like rats or mice or anything that can eat the whatever.
But as far as like regular pest control, if you got a hole, seal it up.
If you got a hole in your wall, seal it up. If you got a hole in your house, seal it up with cocks, something, whatever.
You got to seal up the ways they get in your house.
You've got like overhang. So if you've got trees touching your house or foliage touching your house.
If you have a branch that's about to touch your house, go ahead and chop it off.
Because the ants like to get on those branches and they'll build a nest like inside of your house.
And they'll use that tree to go back and forth between wherever their main nest is and food source or whatever.
So I've seen that happen before where they've been crawling on the house and they'll crawl back and forth.
And I'm like, where are they coming from? And I go trace it and I ends up tracing them to a tree branch that's touching the house.
So you don't want anything touching your house. You want to keep your foundation clear.
And I'm sure there's tons of stuff online, but just mentally, you know, these things that came up with kind of on my own.
So like if you have a foundation, you don't want like foliage or dirt or anything up on your,
the damaging part of your house, the wood part or whatever the siding is.
So you want to have like concrete to dirt. You don't want to have a bunch of crap piled up on the side of your house.
And like, so just keeping it clean around the house and making sure that there's kind of a moat of no food source around your house.
I'm making sure everything around your house is clean and there's nothing like, you know, dead or buckets or water or anything.
That will kind of keep everything clean and everything away from your house.
Kind of kind of DMZ around your house.
I'll say, what else?
I was talking about segmentation DMZ.
Oh, I made a little flyers and let's see if I'll remember. Let me add it.
I'll make this in my add flyer.
If I can find it, it's like a pest control flyer that I say, hey, I'll do your yard for 20 bucks.
Here's some things to help against pest control.
Please make sure your gutters are properly draining.
Go around your house after a good rain.
Make sure there's no standing water in any buckets, plants, any of that stuff.
The biggest thing is your foliage, like your ivies and your like, like hostas, any of those big leafy things that have like a bunch of leaves go down into the ground.
They'll breed in there and that's why your old established neighborhoods, what are mostly ivy?
Old bushes and old foliage and that oldness and that foliage and the overgrown neighborhood, well, not overgrown because it was a forest there first to begin with.
The more trees and nature around you, obviously, the worse you're going to get with pests and especially mosquitoes.
Let's see the outdoor, you know, let your neighbors know that if you're spraying them, I'll take a picture of whatever it is I flipped over before, whatever, and I'm like, here, you had this plant, I flipped it over.
Here's what it looked like before. You're basically breeding mosquitoes.
I fixed a problem for you.
That's pretty much it for outside.
Now, as far as the blower maintenance goes, I don't do that. I do the ethanol-free stuff.
I do the method where you start all your, start all your engines, I don't know, two-stroke engines or whatever.
You start all your motors periodically to make sure they're whatever. I don't use the stable. I use it in the mower.
Stable is like a gas stabilizer and it keeps it from getting gunked up and that's why the ethanol-free stuff supposedly helps with that.
But I just run the chainsaw for a little bit, I'll run the mower for a little bit, I'll run the, because there's always something you can do with a chainsaw.
There's always something you can do with a mower, there's always something you can do with the blower and the chainsaw, maybe not so much.
But I have neighbors and stuff that want branches down and I'll ask them, hey, I'm coming out with a chainsaw, what do you want?
And they tend to enjoy that.
Just basic stuff, if you have issues with it starting, start working on something that's not yours.
You've got neighbors across the street and they have a power tool or something that's not working, grab it from them.
Take it apart, clean the carburetor out, take apart the carburetor, clean it out, get another carburetor, replace the fuel lines, replace the little fuel bubble thing.
See if you can get it to work. I feel like I look at something, I Google it, if it's a piece of garbage, I don't work on it.
If it's a decent brand or it's newer, then I'll start with new carburetor, that's my new rule now.
If it's whatever it is, if it's old, and something I want to work on, and then instead of motor, I'll replace the carburetor because of these little layers of rubber and sometimes fabric and sometimes cardboard and whatever.
Depending on how they make the carburetor, they have these weird ones, they're like doughnuts and they have floaters in them and just buy a new carburetor.
If you can buy a different one that works differently and we're a standard newer model instead of the ones that have this little floater thing that I don't really comprehend or understand.
I try to get a different carburetor that works better, a more modern one if possible, but a lot of stuff I work on is crap and I just kind of get it to work and then it sort of have works and then I smash into pieces and move on.
Just to learn about motors and so I can fix my own stuff better when it, my good stuff, better when it actually does crap out.
It's pretty much for outdoors, you know, put in the water first, then put in the chemical and I'll mix it around with water before I dump it in there.
So I'll have a cup, I have a cup where I do my measurements, pour all my chemicals in the cup safely with safety goggles and all that stuff, your PPE as the word says now.
Do all that stuff, mix it with water, mix it in with water and get the solution mixed with water and then I dump it in the tank of water.
I don't dump those fluid directly in there because it's not really, sometimes it kind of, you know, tends to stick on the bottom if it's the maverick or the gooey based stuff and the estrenzo which is more of a liquid.
The outdoor stuff, so that, you know, wear boots, watch for snakes.
You definitely want to wear boots and some good pants, preferably like, you know, your military, no rip true spec pants or something like that.
It gets you some nice pants, gets you some nice boots to protect your ankles just in case you step on something and nail.
You know, you run into something, you trip on a rock or fall on a hole, it's also a dangerous hazard.
It's also a dangerous, not only is it, are you adjusting chemicals and carrying around a really heavy backpack if this is your profession.
You're also taking the risk of falling over.
I climb up on the side of houses sometimes and areas where I shouldn't be climbing and I'll spray down in there because I know it's real bad.
People have tarps on top of stuff and I'll inspect those and make sure that there's no standing water on those and tell them, you know, if you're going to use a tarp, make sure you allow the water to run off of the tarp and not build up in a specific place.
And if you do, you can do something like these little dunkers, which I haven't mentioned.
I'll put those on the list, too, dunkers.
I think they call them dunkers.
This is a little donut and you, I throw them up on the roof where my gutters are about every 90 days or so.
And I throw them up on my neighbor's roofs and they, it's like a little dunker and you put in standing water, wherever the staining water is, it kills the mosquitoes and stuff that are growing in there.
It's pretty much it. I mean, as far as cost goes, it, you know, I would, I would buy, I would buy a, a, a, a, a smaller size of the chemical.
Well, I mean, if you're going to get into it, you're going to need to just go buy, buy the biggest, you can, biggest container you can.
Because if you're buying the blower and you're buying the bigger, if you're going all in, buy, buy it in a bigger, buy the chemicals in a bigger supply and it saves you a little bit of money.
Some of these are really expensive, but they last a long time.
So like the Maverick is a tiny little bottle. And I'm like, what, the bifton was this giant bottle and whatever, well, you use four ounces of the best two to four ounces of the bifton.
Whereas in this stuff, I use like, it's like lower than 0.5 of an ounce for 3.5 gallons.
For like the normal application.
So I, from what I understand in the math is kind of weird too. I, I got to be honest with you.
Like trying to figure out how many square feet you're supposed to use in the mister and the fogger and, like, understand, like, oh, well, if I have, you know, 3,500 square feet, I need to multiply that times my, my, whatever rate and whatever rate for this, but I don't really do any of that.
I just look at people that post and say, oh, well, you know, I put four ounces in my five gallon, whatever, or I have a two gallon pump and I put four ounces in it.
And even if you're doing the pumps, as opposed to the misters, it's also different math. And I don't really care. I kind of do it based on what I see.
So if I see someone posting, I know this is horrible. If I see someone posting, whatever, I look at the math and I'm like, it's too complicated to just whatever. I'll just do get the math as close as I can.
And then I'll check my work online with other people and say, oh, I, I use, you know, half an ounce for this. Okay, well, that's like double or I'll use, you know, an ounce for this while I use only half an ounce.
So anywhere between an ounce and half an ounce feels like between the math, doing the math crappy and looking online, you can figure out the right application that works for you. But, you know, it's kind of one of those things like some people, you know, double the recipe on everything.
And I don't think that's particularly useful or safe because it's just more of, more of a chemical doesn't mean you're actually going to get the results you want.
It's the same thing, but like drugs. I mean, you take a, you take this particular drug, just because you take more of it doesn't mean it's going to be more effective. It's sometimes it doesn't work that way.
But anyways, that's pretty much it. I hope you guys have a safe and pest-free days season.
I'm looking forward to not having roaches take over my house. I had, at one point in time within like two weeks, I had a roach crawl on my foot. This was several years ago.
I had roach crawl across my foot four times in less than two weeks. Like I'd be doing my playing my games at night and I'd be doing whatever it had my hits head on and then I, you know, they'd hear me jump up and run off.
That's when I was playing games three or four years ago. Anyways.
So I hope you guys have a happy season, a pest-free season, and feel free to reach out to me if you have any comments, questions, whatever.
Because this is, it's expensive, man. And if you can do it yourself, you can make the right applications and apply the right, with the right amount and the right frequency.
You can determine how much you want to love with the, with the bug pest guys, you go, you know, they spray and you have to call and when you call, you guys have another appointment and they come down. But with you, you know what you've done, you know, you've done your diligence. If you do the work, you know that it's done the right way.
And obviously there's a learning curve to it. But hopefully this year, everyone please cross your fingers for me because I do not want to do this again next year with, you know, my wife, with now we've already found one in the toothbrush holder.
It was a regular small cockroach. I've seen two baby ones so far. So it's already starting. I haven't sprayed yet for indoor. I sprayed the garage. But anyways, all of you guys go. It's been 38 minutes. Oh my God.
Have a great stay safe. Let me know if you have anything. Have fun. Take it easy.
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