If you own a home, you probably feared what termites can do to your wood. And rightly so: termites cause billions of dollars of damage every year. But treating for termites can wreak havoc on the environment. The poisons that are used to kill the beasts can leach into the soil and into your water supply. The chemicals used are poisonous to humans, too. So what can you do to stop termites?
Use green termite control.Greet termite control methods are just beginning to become popular. They lack many of the risks associated with more traditional ways of dealing with termites, like lacking the risk of getting poisoned. Most of these alternatives don't involve pesticides, relying on other technologies to work.
Heat is an effective alternative method of green termite control to pesticides and fumigation. The temperature needed to kill a termite is actually quite low: if exposed to 120 degrees for an hour, most species will be killed. To achieve the necessary temperature, the house is well sealed. Then heaters are used to bring the temperature inside the house up to around 150 degrees. This high temperature ensures that, even with leakage, the entire structure will be exposed to at least 130 degrees for an hour.
Heat has many benefits over other techniques. First, it is relatively simple and involves no chemicals at all. Second, you can isolate the treatment to problem areas. If the termites haven't made it into the structure of your entire house, then treating the whole house is not necessary. Heat treatment is an extremely powerful form of green termite control. There are some conditions, however. Plants must be removed from the area being treated, because the high heat will kill them. Any other materials that could be damaged by the heat should also be removed. Cheaper paperback books, for example, could have the glue that binds their pages to the spine melt. But, heat is still one of the most versatile forms of green termite control.
If your problem is fairly small, then other green termite control techniques that don't require moving out are available. One such is microwaves. In your microwave oven, microwaves are generated by a magnetron and directed towards your food. Once there, their energy gets unloaded in the water that is in the food. The microwaves heat up the water and cause it to turn to steam Water is the universal solvent, Every living thing has it inside its cells. Pest control companies can use this fact as a form of green termite control. Thermocouples are inserted into the wood the termites have infected and the switch is thrown. Microwaves emanate out, boiling the termites in their own juices.
Electricity is also frequently for green termite control when there are only small areas of infestation. A metal probe is thrust into the holes in wood that termites create and a high voltage, low current flow of electricity is turned on. The electricity arcs to the termites and toasts them. This method is extremely local and cannot be used in larger infestations.
So the next time you have a problem with termites, consider green termite control.
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