Protecting Philadelphia and Landsdowne PA Homes From Termites

Hello everyone. This is Mike Stewart on behalf of the Harpoon Pest Solutions Podcast, with experts in the Philadelphia area when it comes to pest control, Quincy Jones and Vernon Brown. And guys, I want to talk about protecting my home against termites in the Philadelphia area. How is termites different in Philadelphia? What do I need to be concerned about as a homeowner and what do you guys do to help me protect my home?

There are a lot of termites in the Philadelphia area, in Philadelphia Metro area and surrounding suburbs. Some areas, a little harder hit than others, all depends on the history of the area. Some areas were formerly wooded areas, some of the neighborhoods, so they have a lot of issues with moisture underneath the foundations of some of the homes. So certain neighborhoods in the city historically have had issues. A lot of row homes, there’ll be termite activity where a lot of the older homes … Philadelphia’s a old city, historic city, so some of the neighborhoods are over a hundred years old. And what you get with that is a lot of termites that can affect multiple homes all at one time.Mike Stewart:
When is the swarming season that I need to be concerned about, and what do I look for when termites swarm?
So swarming season happens right about now. So the middle of March clear through June, July, you’ll have some termite swarms. In fact, I got a call today from a good friend who has swarmers. He found insects with two pair of wings of equal length in his house. He sent me a picture/ he asked me if this was termites or ants. I was able to take a look at it and I was able to tell him it was definitely a termite swarmer. So once the early spring comes and we have those string of days where it’s 60 degrees or greater and all those things kind of come together, barometric pressure and stuff like that, you’ll have those termites will wake up out of the ground and just explode.Well, I know that termites will do their best to come out of the ground and get and find food too, because what they’re doing is they’re literally eating people’s homes. So I assume you guys have inspection protocols, that you go in crawl spaces and look for the tunnels and everything that is involved with termites attacking your home. And obviously, when you go under there now today with cell phones, you can take pictures and let the homeowner see that there is evidence that there is problems. So talk about the inspections that you guys do to find the problems and then the steps you take to start preventing and treating the problems.Absolutely. So what happens is when we get a call, we’ll normally answer that call free of charge, and we’ll go out to do an inspection. If there’s a crawl space, if there’s a basement, no matter what the foundation is, that’s where we’ll start first. And in the case of swarmers, swarmers automatically signal that there’s a mature termite colony close by. So we’ll inspect and we’ll look for other evidence, termite shelter tubes, mud tubes, other areas where the termites may be active. We’ll look for damaged wood. And a lot of times those areas will be located in a basement or crawl space. And once we do find those things, we’ll look to see just how active it is, if it’s currently active. And we’ll do photo documentation. We’ll take pictures, show those things to the homeowner and then provide them with information as to how we could treat it and how we could help them with it.

What kind of treatment programs do you guys utilize at Harpoon?

Three basic kinds. We do the full conventional treatments where we … There’s a lot of concrete and a lot of asphalt here in the city, so in that case we would have to drill and apply a liquid barrier into the ground that way. And then you have your borates, where we would take a product that’s a borate. It’s just like a salt-based product, and we would apply that to the wood or damaged areas, the active areas. And that’s another way. And then also, we have bait stations which in some of the more suburban areas around the city of Philadelphia, we could apply bait stations around single homes or twin homes that will allow us to monitor if there’s any type of terminates activity throughout the year.

This has been the Harpoon Pest Solutions podcast with Mike Stewart, Vernon Brown and Quincy Jones. And tune in next time to have more questions answered. Be sure to call us, or you can email us at our website, harpoonpestsolutions.com. And if you have any questions that you want us to answer on future podcasts, subscribe to our podcast, share our podcast on social media. But more importantly, if you have a pest problem, remember harpoonpestsolutions.com.