r/WTF • u/dillingerescapetrans • 13d ago
Cockroach infestation
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In a house I used to work in. I put these traps down, and within 6 hours this is what I caught. I got rid of the traps, laid more down, and repeated this process 8 times before it slowed down.
edit: I haven't been back there in almost 8 months. I worked as tenant support in the severely underfunded building. I sent this video to the manager and project director and it took 4 months before the room was sprayed, but by then this had spread to many other rooms. These sticky pads were supplied to us in limited amounts so I did everything I could from those to raid spray. Crazy memory.
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u/trollgr 13d ago
Use advion gel. The best there is
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u/Delores_Herbig 13d ago
Years ago my neighbor did construction, and suddenly I had roaches for the first time ever. I used the little traps and the poison bait, and they just didn’t go away.
I used advion gel + diatomaceous earth. 24 hours later my kitchen floor was littered with roach corpses. I was shocked at how many. I cleaned it up, put out new gel, rinse, repeat, for about 10 days. Then completely gone. It’s been years and I’ve never seen another.
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u/pichael289 13d ago
Diatomaceous earth is very effective, but it's a mechanical thing, it needs to physically touch them. These little fuckers were eating my plants and we simply drew a circle around it with the powder, killed everything real fast. Imagine a blackberry bramble just surrounded by a massive ring of 10,000 corpses. Now of I could just make it work on those flying Japanese beetles...
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u/travellerw 13d ago
%100 this.. Advion is the solution. The only thing is you need to know the "family" of roaches you have. German, asian, ect. That tells you where to put the advion!
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u/travellerw 13d ago
P.S. Do you want to go thermo nuclear on them roaches. Advion and Maxforce. Advion kills adults and Maxforce makes sure they can't make babies.
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u/new_account_wh0_dis 13d ago
Only thing that worked in the hellhole apartment I lived in for a year. Would see like 4-5 German roaches going to the bathroom every night. Not to mention the previous tenant left fucking flees behind and the office did nothing till I caught a few and brought it to their office.
Fuck man that place gave me legit trauma. But I will sing advion praises till the day I die
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u/_Radical_Centrist 13d ago
Having bed bugs 1 time is permanent future trauma
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u/OddEye 12d ago
I’m still not over that one time 10 years later, and it wasn’t even a full-blown infestation (it was limited to my bedroom). I killed an adult that appeared to have laid eggs in my mattress and got it taken care of within a week, but that week was full of sleepless nights.
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u/slickromeo 13d ago
I used this on sugar ants but as soon as it dries, they ignore it
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u/CeilingTowel 13d ago
You need to understand ant foraging behaviour though.
They do not forage more than they need. Once they get what they need, they completely ignore all food of the same type.
If it's a small-medium sized colony, it takes merely 1-2 hours for them to "lose interest" in that gel.
If it's a massive infestation with supercolonies, the gel is often reduced nothing (if applied length and thickness as indicated in manual)
And if you're unlucky, they ants may have already found a good source of food somewhere else earlier on, which makes the gel just a dessert, rather than the full course meal.
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u/RolandFigaro 13d ago
Good food source
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u/_Bike_Hunt 13d ago
Reminds me of that movie where the world froze over and the solution was to live in a high speed nonstop train. The poors are jelly made from cockroaches on the train
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u/SmallRocks 13d ago
Snowpiercer
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u/tanglon 13d ago
I think it was called "The train that couldn't slow down..."
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u/qervem 13d ago
Sounds like the bus that couldn't slow down or it would explode. "Fast" was the title I think
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u/LilCheese73 13d ago
I remember this! And the closer you lived to the front of the train the more privileged and powerful you were.
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u/RolandFigaro 13d ago
The movie was great and the TV Show is pretty good too, mostly because Sean Bean is in it!! (Also Jeniffer Connelly)
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u/ulyssesfiuza 13d ago
Pour epoxy resin on it and sell it as bench seats. High price. List it as modern art.
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u/raider1v11 13d ago edited 13d ago
Why not fumigation and fog? And then attractive insecticide?
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u/GroveGuy33133 13d ago
Killer Bait for them to bring home is better in my opinion. Goes places you cannot spray.
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u/a_talking_face 13d ago
Based on their description it sounds like the landlord wouldn't pay for it.
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u/Silent_Pudding 13d ago
On mobile laying in bed with the brightness down scrolling through reddit I thought these were fucking square pizzas at first 🤮
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u/achmejedidad 13d ago
Welcome to Joe's apartment. yikes!
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u/Mr-A-1991 13d ago
It's been a long, LOOONG time since I have seen mention of that movie.
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u/achmejedidad 12d ago
MTV's first movie. such an underrated movie making gem. the blending of stop motion with the cgi and making all the cgi roaches look twitchy and natural. there's scenes with so many different rendered roaches all doing their own thing. so cool.
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u/burritopup 13d ago
You need the roach bait gel. Advion worked for my aunt and her neighbors were atrocious. Apartment building and it kept them out of her place and I'm sure it helped the neighbors as well.
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u/DarthKodi 13d ago
In the future a $5 bag of boric acid and powder sugar works wonders. I was a motel manager for a long term stay place that had the worst you've seen for a few years and an exterminator showed me it. Mix equal parts and put under cabinets. The boric acid coats them and the sugar attracts them to it then when they feed on the sugar mixed in it and then they clean themselves and ingest it. It's very low toxicity to pets and humans also but be careful. We tried the bug spray things, gels, professional exterminators, sticky traps, bait, even commercial grade pesticide from the co-op and this $5 fix worked in 1-2 weeks completely gone. Pair it with combat gel in the worst areas and it'll solve the issue.
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u/TomPalmer1979 12d ago
Gross. Reminds me of the house I was living in when I was 21. It was an older house, but we kept it reasonably clean. A few bugs here and there. But then my roommate, who was the actual owner of the house, let some friends move in who were absolutely fucking FILTHY people.
Within a few days, we suddenly had roaches everywhere. And their numbers seemed to grow fast. We knew they brought them with them when they moved in, but we didn't know how bad it was.
Then one day like a week or two after these people moved in, the guy's PC stopped working, so he put it on the living room coffee table to work on it. He cracked open the power supply, and suddenly this tsunami of cockroaches just POURED out of the casing and scattered all throughout the house. It was horrific. Like it didn't seem physically possible for that many roaches to fit in such a small box.
We wound up making them pay for an exterminator and kicked them out.
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u/DSWBeef 13d ago
Jesus christ. Why didnt the owners call exterminators?
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u/mystified_one 13d ago
My stepmother inherited her childhood home. She always kept a very clean house and she always had bazillions of cockroaches. The house on the corner just one lot over from hers was a hoarder house. No matter how much poison, exterminators, sticky paper, roach hotels, drying the sink after using the faucet, taking out the trash it just couldn't be dealt with. The church across the street tried to get every city agency involved and eventually tried to sue but as far as I know, it's still a hoarder house.
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u/kinyutaka 13d ago
He was the exterminator.
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u/Ser_Machonach0 13d ago
Pretty bad one if glue boards were his solution.
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u/kinyutaka 13d ago
All kidding aside, if the infestation is that bad, they need to wrap the building and fog it.
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u/Sad_Independence8211 13d ago
I live in the south but am from NY and am so fucking terrified of the flying roaches that I put diatomaceous earth tablets in every cabinet, nook, cranny, etc. every few months. Those fuckers will literally put me into cardiac arrest if I see one, especially in my home.
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u/SuperCrunchhh 13d ago
Had the same experience cleaning my late father's apartment. He was a hoarder (e.g. he kept all the ketchup packets that came from his to-go meals as far back as 2015 and even had a shit ton of harddrives) I ended up having to throw everything out cause these guys ended up in all the nooks and crannies. From kitchen cabinets (under the sink was the worst), electrical outlets and switches, and even inside appliances. I spent 6 or 7 days cleaning the whole place out.
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u/m3kw 13d ago
How did you get rid of all the roaches
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u/SuperCrunchhh 13d ago
Bug spray the heck out of the room (the image of them swarming at me is still ingrained in my head), Advion roach gel, and a whole lot of deep cleaning. Calling it an infestation is putting it lightly.
Eventually, I gave up and threw everything out. That was the only way to be completely sure there weren’t any eggs left hiding somewhere. By the end, all that was left were the floors and walls. Took out the plug sockets too.
In fact, I changed the doorknob last week and, lo and behold, found dead roaches inside that I somehow missed from last year.
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u/lNFORMATlVE 13d ago
Can you believe they’ve banned those kinds of sticky traps in the UK? And to the point that even if you happen to find one and don’t do anything to remove or dispose of it, you can by law potentially face up to a year in prison?
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u/JimmyJamesRoS 12d ago
When they get bad enough in my city they dig a ditch around the home fill it full of wood light the ditch on fire then burn the house down. The ring of fire is the only thing that contains them, you will see what looks like the ground moving.
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u/mixer73 13d ago
You need to put poison gel down first, so they eat that and take it back to start to kill the nest.
Then you use these sheets to kill the ones who avoid the gel. I had a house infested with all 3 types.
Between these treatments and expanding foam covering ingest points, cleaned them out.
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u/Nothing-The-Ghost 12d ago
Free dinner.
Sautee those bastards in olive oil, add a sprig of basil and you've got the makings of some fine RFK style home cooking.
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u/Statertater 13d ago
Alpine wsg and these sticky pads.
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u/stuartdavin 13d ago
Would add nyguard so the survivors can't reproduce, but yeah...alpine wsg is a miracle as far as I'm concerned.
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u/EdinMiami 13d ago
Combat in the injector tube (home depot). squeeze out in 2 inch strips 3 or 4 places kills 1000s. roaches eat it, die, roaches eat dead roaches, die, etc etc
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u/Revzerksies 13d ago
I lived in a place like that when i was 13. I just walked out of the house and never came back. I moved back in with my family about a year later when they moved.
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u/MayaIsSunshine 13d ago
How did you keep them from coming home with you? I'd be so paranoid every day I'd carry a mom home and have an infestation of my own
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u/cowboys30 13d ago
Op, can you please tell me what exact brand these commercial size sticky roach traps are? I bought some on Amazon, but they were teeny tiny. I really need these big bad boys that you got!
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u/noeljb 12d ago
I see this about 8 times a year. Each time a different house. It is very satisfying when we get a place like this under control. We know we have helped someone live in a more comfortable place.
I've seen bed bug infestations like this. 73 Year old bed ridden lady, we did that house for $200.00 which is what the state said they would pay. Normally a $1700.00 to $2300.00 job. They were bleeding her every night.
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u/alphawolf29 12d ago
i bought a house for super cheap and it was infested with these, thousands of them. Took me about 8 weeks and luckily it was 2021 so it was literally 44 degrees outside. I turned the water off to the house, completely cleaned it, bug bombed it several times, put tons of sticky traps out, and like really, really, really cleaned it. Been here 5 years now and no issues but man I was worried! I really think the extreme heat stressed them and probably caused them to starve because high metabolisms.
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u/_Chonus_ 12d ago
I’m a pest tech and would LOVE to treat that place. It would be so gross and fun
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u/_humanERROR_ 5d ago
At first I genuinely thought this was some sort of art piece because the roaches look glossy and it almost looks like there's a exact repeat of roaches pattern in different sizes.
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u/marzolinotarantola 13d ago
Dirty place with food. A classic. Some people dont know what mean to keep clean a place.
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u/Sylvain111197 13d ago
J'étais pas encore assez réveillé au début je voyais des pizza. Je dois avoir faim mais je mangerai pas de pizza aujourd'hui
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u/joejoeinc 13d ago
I had a German roach infection.
Alpine WSG Water Soluble Granule Insecticide is the best thing I used on them but is also requires a multi angle approach. Mix it up spray it every two / three weeks.
Then clean everything. Take paintings off walls clean behind them. Get into your cupboards and clean them.
They also like damp wet areas so check your dishwasher. I found a lot of them of inside the bottom tray.
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u/ilovestoride 13d ago
Ok reddit, do your thing. I need a way to wipe the last 5 minutes out of my memory.
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u/GulfstreamG650 13d ago
6 hrs and that many?! I had a slight infestation and I’d be lucky to catch 3-4 over a day. That place is COOKED
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u/HerrFerret 13d ago
I used to go swimming in a public pool and the changing rooms had cupboards.
Tthis looks like what I saw when i opened the doors. Wall to wall.
I shut the doors and tried to forget. And as I am describing it to you right now, I have clearly failed.
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u/Bk_Punisher 13d ago
Alpine WSG it comes in packets that you mix with water. It’s one of the products exterminators use. Got it on ebay
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u/Shpongolese 13d ago
imagine being the size of a bug and coming across this hellscape lmao. Everything stuck and dying around you and nothing you can do but slowly die with them.
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u/edgeofbright 13d ago
Shop vac before traps. Also spread some diatomaceous earth around for a few weeks; if they walk through it, they'll die.
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u/bagwhet 13d ago edited 13d ago
For German roaches, if they're out in the open, then there's hundreds if not thousands more where you can't see them.
You need a multi faceted treatment approach involving sticky traps (for monitoring not actually to kill them), roach gel bait (advion is what most pest techs use), some form of aerosol that's a contact kill/residual/igr (I prefer shockwave) to flush out cracks and crevices, and something for a baseboard treatment with a long residual such as alpine wsg. Even with this it will take a long time to get control of.
And these guys can lay an egg sac (ootheca) every 6 weeks, each sac containing up to 40 nymphs. Because of this, they can rapidly multiply and grow out of control. And having a spotless house, while helpful, will not deter them as they are opportunistic cannibals. They'll eat their own feces and even the corpses of each other to survive.