I let out a ground floor flat and the tenant called me saying they had a problem with ants.i visited and scraped the weeds and dirt away from the outdoor way and sprayed deathlac down. Due to coviid I gave the the spray to do the skirting board inside. As landlord where do my responsibilities lie?. I want to help because its unpleasant but…
We had the same problem in one of our houses. We recommended that the tenants buy Raid spray, pull back the carpets carefully and spray under the doors and skirting boards. The ants pick it up and take it back to the nest apparently to kill them all. I contacted the tenants a couple of weeks later and all was well.
If that hadn’t worked we would have done whatever was needed to put it right. I consider a pest like that to be the landlords problem as long as you are sure the tenant is cleaning reasonably and not leaving food lying around etc
Thanks steve. I will call them and see how they are getting on
Landlords are responsible for pest control in almost ever situation & even if their are not lawfully responsible a Landlord should be sorting it out, if the tenant has evidently caused the pest issue one could argue its the tenants responsibility yet proving this would be almost impossible, hire an expert to provide expert advice and follow it or the pests will take up permanent residence at your costs and stress.
With ants the number 1 important thing is to find their entrance point before you can deal with the situation, no entrance point detected = no eradication.
once the entrance point has been found then provide the necessary poison for them to take back to the nest as killing ants with sprays and such like doesn’t do anything to the nest, you need the ants to take the poison back to the nest to kill the whole nest and the queen or forever have the issue and there is a great home made posing you can do with basic house held stuff or buy the correct poison, however you will also need to identify exactly what type off ant you are dealing with or yet again your attempts will more likely than not keep failing.
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ants will come as long as there are crumbs or food for them - so keeping things scrupulously clean is also important.
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Personally, I would recommend the ant traps over the spray because it attracts the ants, they take the poison back to the nest thinking it is food and it will deal with the whole nest, not just the surface problem. Powders and sprays will only kill the ones you can see not the whole nest. So the problem will keep recurring.
They are smart buggers. Our home is very clean. At the time we employed a cleaner and in between weekly visits we cleaned ourselves. Several years ago, we went away on holiday for 2 weeks in the summer. Came back to find an ant trail from the bottom corner of the patio door where the rubber seal had a very small gap and stretching almost 15m to a cupboard in a bathroom where they were feeding off the residue around the cap of a bottle of cough linctus! Despite having the greatest admiration for them, I hoovered them all up, disinfected the trail and fixed the 3mm gap in the door seal. The end. Oh, to answer your question, sorting is landlord’s responsibility unless you can prove beyond doubt that the tenant caused the issue - very difficult.