A little bit of Borax will kill all of the roaches in your home cheaply, quickly, permanently and with no toxicity issues.*
I’ve done it. I’ve published the one sentence that I wish I had read years ago. And if you have any friends who have at all complained about roaches, please forward this to them. Or blog about it yourself and forward that to them. I don’t care. I’m not taking credit. I just know there must be thousands if not millions of people out there that need this information to make their homes safe for themselves and their children.
What does this have to do with Japan and their recent tragedy? First I must tell you about a slum in Canoga Park.
The Spawn, The Spousal Unit and I moved from our apartment in Canoga Park to a much nicer one on the other side of the valley less than a year ago. We are happy with our move and wouldn’t change this event if we could go back in time. There were many reasons to move, one of them being gunplay right outside our window, but the biggest was the management’s complete mismanagement of their roach problem.
Over a year previous to our move, we started getting bugs coming into our bathroom from the adjacent apartment. I complained to the manager who said that our neighbors were old and messy and that there was nothing he could do. We fought the bugs with traditional pesticides and they seemed to leave us alone for the most part, with strays coming over every once in a while. I hated using pesticides because we have a small child and had two cats.
Frostmourne didn't help rid of us the roaches in the old place either.
A few months later, roaches started moving in. This time we got some roach motels which worked for a couple weeks and then failed. We contacted the new management and they sent over a professional pest control guy who put gel in our cupboards. This worked for a couple weeks and then failed. We again complained and they arranged to have us get regular pest control visits. The next time the pest control guy showed up, he expected us to have all of our stuff removed from the kitchen so he could spray and for us to be ready to move out of the apartment for half a day. We weren’t. Several weeks of negotiations, misunderstandings and frustrations later, the bugs were pouring in from all fixtures and electrical sockets.
We stopped negotiating, packed up our things and prepared to move. We discovered when packing that most of our furniture and many of our pristine storage boxes were homes to vast metropolises of roaches. I say “pristine” because you expect to see that kind of thing in this kind of infestation if you’ve thrown a bunch of crap into a cardboard box and let your toddler stuff cheerios in it. But you don’t expect to find clean collectible items from various E3s and BlizzCons that have been neatly stored in closed plastic boxes completely ruined by roaches. Roaches eat paper and are more than happy to eat that and their own poop and each other forever if you let them, it seems. Good to know. So we had to discard about half of our belongings when we moved and knew we were transporting some roaches with us.
In the meantime, I had researched natural ways to control these pests. I found articles about bay leaves and cedar and many other natural remedies that were non toxic and good for the environment. We tried them all. We did seem to have some success with the cedar blocks in our boxes as there didn’t seem to be quite so many hitchhikers as we thought, but nothing eliminated our problem.
Our biggest worry was our fridge. We couldn’t afford a new one and we suspected that there were roaches living inside. After our move, once we managed to hunt down and kill the bugs in the rest of the house that had piggybacked on our stuff, we found we had a constant battle in the kitchen due to the large family/city inside our fridge where we couldn’t do anything about it. We felt terrible. We didn’t like sullying our new place with these horrific creatures and we didn’t like the fact that they certainly must have found their way to other apartments. We fought the battle with traditional means as best we could, completely polluting some areas of our kitchen in order to get rid of some infestations. Yet we still found them lurking, particularly at night. We were miserable.
Did the pesticides and bugs help speed along the demise of our boys? I suspect so.
Then the earthquake hit Japan, causing a tsunami and nuclear disaster. I, like most people, read as much as I could and donated where I could as well. One of the articles I read said that they used boric acid to help with the reduction of radiation in the nuclear reactors. I then googled boric acid to see if that was the same thing as Borax, just to get context.
While googling, I saw an article about boric acid killing roaches which never, ever, EVER, ever came up in all of my previous research. It and a couple of other articles extolled the virtues of how boric acid acts as bait and then the roaches bring it back to their homes and all of them die without any bad effects on your home except for boric acid dust where it may not be visually pleasing.
So I bought a box of Borax for 7 dollars. It’s hard to find pesticides in any form for that little in that quantity. I took a small portion and sprinkled it around my kitchen, particularly near the refrigerator. For the next couple of days, many roaches started making their escape to other parts of the house. We hadn’t seen so many roaches out of the kitchen in weeks. So then The Spousal Unit had the idea to clean up and reapply in the kitchen, this time focusing on all baseboards, under all cupboards and specifically creating a barrier across the doorway into the rest of the apartment. A week after that — one week — we saw no more roaches. None. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. NO ROACHES.
We have used a total of a cup of Borax. Maybe. And our roach problem is gone.
The Spawn relaxing in our roach-free home
This makes me angry. Yes, of course we’re all ecstatic that we are completely roach and pesticide free in our home for so little money and effort. But I’m furious that this information is not known by everyone. This should be common knowledge. Why isn’t it? Why is this only known by a very few people – that you can completely eliminate a massive roach problem by sprinkling a few cents of something benign in some out of the way places? Is there some massive pesticide company conspiracy? Did Raid lobby the FDA so that Borax couldn’t put this amazingly helpful and sanitary use of their product on their labels? What happened here?
Well maybe we can fix it. Please pass this information along.
* It is classified as a poison and should not be ingested, just like your laundry detergent. But you don’t have to evacuate your home to use it or any of the other precautions necessary with normal pesticides. You probably want to make sure your pets don’t step on it and then lick it off though.
Note: I have not been paid by the makers of Borax or anyone for this post. Though I would definitely accept sponsorship money from them, I would let you know if I had.
