Keep Ants Away – Naturally!

Are ants invading your home? We’ve noticed a lot at our home and it seems it’s a never ending battle during the summer to keep them out.

Clear The Air would like to share some all-natural, green ways to keep pests out of your home:

Stop the scouts: The first few ants you see in your kitchen is a warning there are more. They are checking your kitchen to see if you have any goodies for them. Keep all food off your counters and wipe up any crumbs.

Close up entry: Seal any small holes or cracks in your home that ants may be able to get through. You can use silicone caulking, putty, glue or plaster. If you don’t have that on hand, a temporary solution such as petroleum jelly can work. But make sure you get a hold of a permanent solution soon.

Use Soapy Water: Grab a spray bottle and add a teaspoon of dish soap in it and fill the rest with water. When you see ants, spray them with the dish soap solution. You can also add any type of citrus to your mixture…ants hate citrus.

Put up a barrier: you can use many different household items to sprinkle around your home or around any areas you think the ants are entering. Some of these items include cinnamon, cayenne pepper, baby powder, white vinegar and citrus oil.

Create natural baits: Corn meal works great and is safe to use around pets and children. The ants will carry it home and try to eat it but they cannot digest it properly. Coffee grounds also work great as they will take it back to their colony and they cannot properly digest it.

How do you keep ants away from your home? Comment on our blog…

How To Keep Pests Out Of Your Home

No one likes pests in their home.

Unfortunately sometimes when we get rid of pests, such as mice and rodents, their odor can linger.

Clear The Air Odor Eliminators will eliminate those odors easily and safely. Check out our tips to keep pests out of your home:

Rodents and raccoons:

• Raw bacon or peanut butter makes good bait for a mousetrap. Make sure a mouse will have to tug the trap to remove the bait. If you’re using peanut butter, dab some on the triggering device and let it harden before setting the trap. If bacon is your bait, tie it around the triggering device.
• If a raccoon sets up housekeeping in your attic or chimney, chemical repellants such as oil of mustard, are temporarily effective. (The smell may bother you as much as it does the raccoon.) Your best bet is to let the animal leave, and then cover its entrance hole with wire mesh so that it cannot return.
• To keep rodents out of your house, seal every opening they could squeeze through. Some need less than 1/4 inch of space. Put poison in deep cracks or holes, and stuff them with steel wool or scouring pads pushed in with a screwdriver. Close the spaces with spackling compound mixed with steel wool fragments.

Insects:

• If your home becomes infested with fleas, vacuum rugs thoroughly before spraying, and throw the dust bag out at once.
• Keep ants away from your home with a concoction of borax and sugar. Mix 1 cup sugar and 1 cup borax in a quart jar. Punch holes in the jar’s lid, and sprinkle the mixture outdoors around the foundation of your home and around the baseboards inside your house. The ants are attracted by the sugar and poisoned by the borax.
• If you have cockroaches, sprinkle borax powder in the kitchen and bathroom cabinets. Avoid sprinkling where children and pets could be affected.

Keeping Pests Out The Green Way

No one wants pests in their home.

Unfortunately many solutions to getting rid of pesky pests involve harmful pesticides which are poisonous to you, your children and your pets.

As a green product itself, Clear the Air likes to find green solutions to keeping pests out of your home.  We would like to share some helpful tips on keeping your home pest free, naturally!

Once summer time approaches, bugs start making an appearance in homes across the U.S. From ants to wasps to millipedes, our first instinct is to spray them down with as much poison as it takes to make them stop.  Our natural instinct to getting rid of insects, no matter how many legs they may have, is usually to use bug killer.

Before spreading poison throughout your living environment, which you, your children, and pets will breathe in, try these all-natural alternatives.

Prune Shrubs – To control pests inside the house, a lot of work needs to be done outside the house. Insects often find their way into the house by climbing on shrubs and trees that are touching the outside walls of your house. Trim everything back so there is a foot clearance between plants and exterior walls.

Rake – Likewise, many insects that live in leaf and lawn debris are going to find easy access indoors if they are hanging out near the foundation of your house. Rake this area well. Pull weeds and only keep plants and shrubs that are well cared for near your foundation. Anything that is dead or dying will attract insects.

Say No to Wood Chip Mulch – It is popular right now to cover flower beds with wood chip mulch. The problem with this is that insects, like carpenter ants and termites, love wood chips. Putting food for them near the foundation of your house isn’t the best idea. They will easily travel from the flower beds to the interior of your home. If you must cover the dirt in your flower beds with something, consider rubber mulch, such as Everlast Rubber Mulch. An additional benefit of Everlast Rubber Mulch is that it is made of 100% recycled tires.

Clean the Kitchen – Summertime and ants go hand in hand. They often infest a kitchen faster than you can put the cap on the soda bottle. To prevent an all you can eat ant buffet, keep your kitchen clean. Washing dishes after each meal and putting all food away in the refrigerator will go a long way towards keeping the ant pests out of your house. If you do have a trail of ants leading to your kitchen, find the source. Are they swarming to the sticky spot under the stove? Clean it up and spray the whole length of the trail with vinegar to clean off any scent they may have left.

Look to Old-Fashioned Remedies – If your house is plagued with ants, chances are you’ve got some ant hills in the yard. An old-fashioned remedy is to boil a pot of water on the stove and poor it down the ant hill. If you do a few a day, you will soon have greatly decreased the number of ants sharing your property.

Once you’ve poured boiling water on all the ant hills, mix some borax and powdered sugar together. Put some on a plastic lid and place it in any area that ants congregate. Only do this if you don’t have pets or small children that are likely to find it. The ants will take the borax and sugar mixture back to their nest, hopefully killing their queen.

Relax – Most insects won’t kill you, but the poison you spray on them might. So, if your insect problem is minor, then don’t worry about it too much. Take some preventative measures and let it go.

Tips to Keep Pests Out!

No matter where you live and what type of house you live in, there will always be some sort of “pest” that will try and get into your home.

If you have had an exterminator come out, your problem is temporarily fixed.  However, it is now up to you to ensure the pests stay away from your home for good. The five tips below are basic and straightforward and in no time, you will have a home that is as clean as it is pest-free! Here are some tips on keeping bugs and rodents from coming back.

Clean up after yourself – Pests, like ants for example, will be attracted to anything with a sticky or sugary surface.  Pay special attention t your counters, cabinets, floors and tops of your refrigerator.  Basically, anywhere that a sugary residue could be hiding is pretty much a guaranteed target for ants to swarm to.

Water Waste – Pests love pools of water and if you have any kind of water collection forming inside or outside of your house, its time to get rid of that.  The sooner you eliminate leaks, puddles, etc, the sooner you can eliminate lingering pests.  Even something as simple as a damp cloth in the bathroom will attract ants.

Seal Your Food – Keep food in sealed containers.  Simply loosely wrapping up bags of chips or cookies are an easy way to pests to make themselves at home feasting on your food.  Make sure all food is sealed in an airtight container and stored in cabinets.

No Cracks or Holes – Small areas such as holes or cracks in the walls and floors are an inviting place for pests to call home.  Make sure to seal any pest friendly areas of your house.

Be Proactive – If pests have taken over your home before, it is likely it will happen again.  In order to make sure they don’t come back, get in the habit of hiring an exterminator on a regular basis.  Preventative visits may be all you need.

If you have a rat infestation and the exterminator comes and the rats are poisoned, most likely you will sooner or later experience a foul odor coming from the walls.  Instead of knocking down walls to remove the decaying rat carcass, simply place Clear the Air Odor Remover Bags throughout your house and the odor will be eliminated.  Read more on Removing Dead Rodent Odors here.