Why Year-Round Prevention is the Best Defense Against Termite Damage

When is the perfect time to call a termite control professional? Is it when you're doing a renovation and your carpenter tells you that the wall in your bedroom is filled with worker termites? Is it when you're digging up an area in front of your home for a new section of landscaping and discover thousands of white-winged termite swarmers? Is it when you get into the crawl space under your home to deal with a plumbing problem and come face to face with a network of termite shelter tubes? These are the worst times to call a termite control professional, not because we can’t help get rid of them, but because the damage will have already been done! If you wait until termites are in your walls, have nested near your foundation, or are attacking your home from underneath, you've waited too long. It is much more difficult to get termites out of a home once they’ve invaded than to protect a home from being invaded by termites in the first place. And like we mentioned above, when you see the above signs, it is likely that extensive and hard-to-repair damages have already been done to your home. Yet, this is typically when most homeowners call a termite control professional. If you agree that this is a bad idea, then you have another question to address: which is better, year-round termite prevention or a once-a-year termite inspection?
 
Some homeowners choose to invest in routine termite inspections rather than having a termite defense product installed around their home. We understand why you might want to do this. It doesn't cost as much. But you get what you pay for. A once-a-year inspection, or worse, a once-in-a-while termite inspection can leave your home vulnerable to termite damage between inspections.
 
You might ask yourself, how much damage can termites do to my home in one year? Well, that is a good question to ask. There are a few points to consider:

• A home can be attacked by more than one termite colony at a time. Termites will travel as far as the length of a football field to find a food source. If several colonies find your home at the same time, they can do a lot of damage in a year—and even more damage if you go longer than a year in between inspections, which is often what happens. It's easy to get busy with life and forget to schedule an inspection.
  
  

• Termites feed on the inside of wood.They don't nibble away at the outside. So, when they get into support beams and the timbers in load-bearing walls, you won't be able to see it. That makes fixing termite damage a complicated process. You may think you took care of all the damage only to realize that something isn't quite right as floors begin to sag and slant or walls begin to bulge over time.

The better solution is to have a year-round termite defense product, such as the Sentricon® System with Always Active™. This system works 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to detect termite workers as they invade your property to feed on your the wood of your home and immediately strike out at any attacking colonies, sometimes eliminating them before a termite control technician will need to take any further action. And if you have more than one colony attacking your home at the same time, Sentricon® with Always Active™ will work to neutralize them all.
 
While termite inspections are certainly important in the process of protecting properties from subterranean termites, they are only one part of the solution. Don't trust your equity to termite inspections alone! These wood-consuming insects cost U.S. property owners over $5 billion annually. However, that is a statistic you don't have to be a part of. When you invest in professional, year-round termite control, you decide how much costly damage you're going to allow subterranean termites to cause to your home. You never have to be surprised with overwhelming repair costs and the possibility that the damage that has been done to your home can't be fixed.
 
For more information about termite control or to request a free estimate, reach out to us! Thomas Pest Services is a Certified Sentricon® Installer in Albany New York and the surrounding area.