How to Get Rid of Mosquitoes in the House

How to Get Rid of Mosquitoes in the House

A lot of the inquiries we receive come from folks who have issues both inside and outside the home with mosquitoes. We wanted to help clarify some of the misunderstandings we often hear regarding mosquitoes in the house.

Firstly, contrary to popular belief, mosquitoes do not want to be inside.  They want warm, wet soil and plant life to feed from. Certainly, mosquitoes can gather by your doorways, seeking shade from the sun under the eaves of your home. But they typically make their way inside by mistake – the force of the air movement and suction when a door opens can pull them inside. Mosquitoes are not good fliers at all, and given their size and body weight, even a light breeze can disrupt their flight.

brick wall with lightOnce inside mosquitoes are facing a very short life span. Without food (plant nectar from the underside of leaves) and water, they won’t survive long. They will congregate by windows to try and get back outside. To help alleviate the issues of mosquitoes inside you should control the numbers outside (we have provided some easy-to-follow steps to do this in several of our previous blog posts, but the less water in your yard the better off you are.) The other thing you can do to help is to avoid having your outside lights on at night – these will draw mosquitoes and other insects up to the house and make the situation worse. This includes bug zappers which only serve to draw mosquitoes close by but won’t kill them (mosquitoes won’t fly into the light but instead start looking for CO2 plumes.) Hanging mosquito traps near the house is also a bad plan. You draw mosquitoes in from the yards around you, and then get bitten when the mosquito opts for you over a trap (mosquitoes seek you out both via CO2 plumes and by heat.)

sink drainSpeaking of other insects, the majority of the time that we receive calls for mosquitoes inside the house they are not mosquitoes at all. They are, instead, lake flies or “biting midges.” These guys look very similar to a mosquito, maybe just a tad smaller, and bite the same way. What’s interesting about them is that they are often found in bathrooms and the customer assumes they came in through an open door. The truth is they mostly come in through your drains. The sludge that builds up in your u-bends makes for the perfect home for them to lay eggs.

There is a super simple way to prevent this issue, and we recommend to every customer that they do this twice a year. Simply pour an eighth of a gallon of bleach into each drain and then flush with hot water for 5 minutes.  The bleach helps break up the sludge and the hot water will flush the drains out. In bathrooms that are rarely used, such as a guest bath, close the drains where you can. Within a few days you will see a dramatic improvement. Of course, if you need help reducing the population of mosquitoes and biting midges outside you can reach us 979-859-5998. We provide our quotes at no charge and there are never any contracts with us.

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