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By: Dennise Brogdon
Fall is a wonderful season with the beautiful foliage, clear
skies, and cooler temperatures. It’s a great time to
be outdoors. While, you might be looking for outdoor activities
this time of year, bugs are looking for the indoors. During
the fall months, insects begin looking for warmer places to
spend the night and where they can spend the winter. The place
they find may be your home.
Ladybugs, spiders, crickets, roaches, box elder bugs, millipedes,
and many more insects begin their search in the fall for a
warm place to make their home. Before you are overrun with
these tiny little creatures, you might want to try some prevention
techniques.
Home maintenance professionals recommend a maintenance plan
for your home to help you save energy during the cold months
of winter. But, many of the same techniques the maintenance
professionals recommend also help in keeping out insects,
mice, birds, and bats.
Many insects enter your home by crawling or flying in through
cracks in the doors. If you use a screen door during the cooler,
fall months, make sure the door fits well and that you don’t
have holes in the screen. A door, screen or solid, that has
cracks along the sides, bottom, or at the top, not only will
let air in, but it also lets in tiny insects. Check along
the edges of your doors to make sure the weather stripping
is in good shape. If it is old and doesn’t seal your
door any longer replace it with new weather stripping. You
can buy weather stripping at nearly any hardware or home maintenance
store.
Did you know that mice can squeeze into an area the size
of a dime? They can, and with that in mind, you should take
a close look around the outside of your house. Keep a dime
in your pocket so you will remember just how small the holes
can be. Often, you will find holes around outside water facets,
next to windows, doors, and where electrical and cable enters
your home. You should seal these areas with foam insulation,
caulking, wood putty, or a small patch of concrete, depending
on where the holes are found. Check the areas around the foundation
of your home especially, because at the foundation is where
weather could have caused some damage over the past year or
so, and it is a good place for pests to enter. When sealing
the holes, keep in mind that you may not be keeping out just
a mouse. You may be keeping out carpenter ants, beetles, spiders,
and a whole list of other insects, so you probably want to
seal these areas even if they are smaller than a dime.
Check around your windows for cracks in the caulking and
where the window fits into the frame. If the caulking is old
and weathered and it is no longer keeping the air from coming
into the home, you should scrape out the old caulk and put
in a fresh new coat. Any number of insects can scale your
home, even to the second story, to get in through a crack
in the window.
Check the gable vents in your home. Bats, birds, and flying
insects love warm attics during the fall and winter months.
The air vent screens should be of a small mesh and should
not have any holes. Remember, the mouse and the dime here
too. Mice are known to scale walls, and they could enter your
attic very easily if the screen is old and worn enough that
they can chew through.
Fall is a wonderful season, and it’s a great time to
prepare for the winter months ahead. If you do a little home
maintenance this fall, be sure to keep in mind that not only
do you want to keep the cold air out, but you also want to
keep pests from moving in as well.
For information on how to get rid of these insects, visit
http://www.pestproductsonline.com.
About The Author
Dennise Brogdon is the managing editor of the Hughston Health
Alert, a quarterly, patient-information newsletter, and she
is an editorial assistant for the National Athletic Trainers’
Association’s scientific journal, the Journal of Athletic
Training. Dennise is a Web site copywriter and editor. She
has experience writing and editing SEO copy and META tags,
brochures, advertorials, video scripts, and other technical
and promotional material, as well. Dennise earned a BA in
English with professional writing as an emphasis at Columbus
State University. She is a member of the American Medical
Writers Association and the Georgia Writers Association.
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