TERMITES

Michael Holigan: Americans spend one billion dollars a year to replace wood damaged by termites. To help prevent this kind of damage in the first place, you need to have your home inspected annually, but if you're like a lot of home owners, you may wonder what exactly the exterminator should be doing during an inspection of your house.

Mike Terry: Typically we start on the outside of the house and walk around the outside looking for possibly mud tubing coming up the foundation wall, looking for conducive conditions such as wood to ground contact, maybe excessive moisture, looking at the sloping of the grade to determine whether the drainage is proper and we're getting the water away from the house. Seeing if we've got foundation showing. We would like to see three inches of foundation and really just we're walking the whole house. We will also watch the gutter to see if the gutters are full and properly draining. Look at the eave areas and see if we notice any decay or moisture problems up there as well.

M.H.: Mike says most home owners expect an exterminator to look for hollow or rotting wood. But he should also help you spot any conducive conditions for termites.

M.T.: When your brick is down to the, the grade level or below it, or your wood veneer or your stucco are some highly conducive conditions. I thing the biggest one we've got is wood to ground contact. Because that is an easy access for the termite right into the wood member. Wood to ground contact can be like a wood deck that a home owner's built outside their back porch area. The wood piers many time are going straight down into the ground, the dirt, and we would highly recommend that those wood piers be on concrete pads and eliminate that wood to ground contact. We also recommend highly that your drain, your gutter drain line has a down spout. Sprinkler heads can be a conducive condition. If the head is pointed right at the house you can create excessive moisture right at the house. The more moisture you have it's highly probably that you could have a termite problem in there.

M.H.: If you have a slab foundation your exterminator should also be looking at every place a pipe comes up through the slab.

M.T.: Normally your kitchen area, your hot water heater area, your air conditioning unit area and all bathrooms. Typically, a bathtub, when they pour slab, has what we call a sand trap where the drain line is connected and this is an area that really the concrete has not been filled in and the termite has easy access to your house. A shower's a little bit different because of the moisture. Most of us don't maintain our shower grout, ectera as well as we should and many times we can end up having a shower problem or a leak in the wall cavity. And it sort of invites the termite into the area and he gets there and he likes it and many times doesn't even have to go back to the ground for moisture. He can live right there in the actual wood, which we call a secondary infestation.

M.H.: Because subterranean termites come up from the ground to eat the wood in your home, the condition of your foundation itself is also a big concern.

M.T.: We'll look for stress cracks on the outside to see if we see any movement in the brick or any cracks in the foundation itself. And, of course, going inside the house, we can determine that movement by the stress cracks in the sheetrock and stuff that we were able to observe.

M.H.: Every spring and early summer termites swarm briefly in yards and houses. If you see them, it's a sure sign there's an active colony already at work. You may find wings that were shed after the swarming or other warning signs, like blistering paint or tunneling underneath it. In any case, it's time to call an exterminator. Remember that termite treatment is an continuous ongoing process of placing a barrier between your house and the termite colony. You need a check up at least once a year.

Episode 45 1996 - 97 Season

| Termites | Utility Knifes | Flooring | Changing Shower Head | Choosing Carpet | Painting Tip | The Closing |

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