Winter time and colder weather can create a unique way to pest proof your home. This can be achieved by turning negatives into positives and using cold spots to your benefit.
Focus on exclusion for your foundation of pest proofing your home
The foundation of how to pest proof your home should always be exclusion. This includes sealing cracks, crevices, and entry points into your home. The most likely way you’ll get pest issues is invasion from the outside.
This is why sealing your home properly becomes so important. Some of the most common entry points you’ll run into are underneath doors, through windows and broken screens, cracks in the foundation, through vents and more.
There is definitely a lot of ground to cover when it comes to exclusion for pest activity. Pest proofing can take some time and be rather tedious, but it can greatly reduce activity.
Starting with the basics of installing door sweeps, putting weather stripping under windows, fixing screens, and putting screens on exterior vents is a great place to start. Even with doing that, pests can still slip through the cracks. (Pardon the pun…)
Using the elements to your advantage as an effective way to pest proof your home
Unfortunately, exclusion can be kind of tricky. Finding every possible entry point can be difficult, especially if you don’t know where to look. That’s where turning negatives into positives and using the elements to your advantage comes into play as an effective way how to pest proof your home.
One way that you can find tough to spot entry points you need to seal is with light. This strategy typically works best in basements, but can be used throughout your home as well.
The key to this trick is to make the rooms you are trying to pest proof as dark as possible. Then search for any light sources that trickle in through any cracks. In most cases if there is room for light to get through, there is room for pests to get through.
Many pests like spiders and insects can squeeze through a space as little as an 1/8 of an inch. Larger pests like mice and rodents can squeeze in through spaces as small as 1/4 of an inch.
Another way to spot potential entry points is using cold spots to your advantage. Sometimes using light as a way to find entry points can be tough, especially if there are windows in the room. While using light can work, often using cold points during the winter can be more effective.
While going through rooms, if you find cold spots, that usually means there is some way for the cold from the outside to get into your home. As we stated earlier, if cold can get in, pests probably can too.
Use this cold spot strategy to seal up common entry points for pests, so when temperatures start to warm up, pests won’t have easy access to your home. Pest proofing your home 100% can be difficult if not impossible, but with these steps you can greatly reduce the potential issues getting into your home.
We also recommend having your home treated both during the winter as well as throughout the year as another layer of protection. Treating your home through a pest control service in the winter months can reduce and eliminate any pests that did manage to get in before you sealed the entry points, and can reduce or eliminate potential pest issues come spring time, when pests start being more active again.
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