In ‘Preparing for Fumigation in Orange County, Part I’, we discussed a bit about the dangers of fumigation and the basic pre-prep you need to perform in order to get ready for your choice of termite control Orange County businesses. Next, we’ll talk about the actual preparations to the inside and outside of your home that you should accomplish in the hour or two before the crew arrives.

Exterior

• Trim plants back a foot from your home, and move all items at least five feet away from your outer wall. This is necessary for the tent to be properly secured around your home.
• Unlock all gates and doors on all buildings on your property. Fumigators are legally obligated to make certain that no one is in any structure on the property, even if they’re only fumigating the main structure.
• Water the ground around your home. The water acts as an impermeable barrier to keep the fumigant from escaping the tent by moving through loose topsoil.

Interior

• Use the Nylofume bags provided by your fumigators to protect anything and everything that you might one day consume — food, medications, drinks (even if they’re in sealed bottles), and so on. Metal cans don’t need to be bagged, but bagged food like cereals, boxed food like macaroni and cheese, and even plastic-wrapped food like Cup O Noodles do need to be bagged. Also include anything you will one day smear all over your body like shampoo, sunscreen, and makeup.
• Lock your valuables in your safe or take them with you. It’s sad to say, but there are occasional thefts associated with fumigation.
• Take all of the ice out of your ice maker and turn it off.
• Remove plastic mattress covers and furniture covers — they’re great at trapping Vikane and releasing it later, which can be harmful.
• Remove all pets and plants from your home.

Congratulations, you’re ready to be safely fumigated. Stay somewhere comfortable for the next 48-72 hours and be ready to return home to a place free of destructive, disgusting little bugs.

There’s a bit of a debate surrounding fumigation in Orange County, but that’s because a lot of people aren’t really familiar with the proper method of performing a fumigation. If they had an understanding of the process, they wouldn’t be nearly as dramatic about it.

Their primary argument is that fumigation involved filling your house with poison gas, and there’s just no way for that to be safe. The common response is that tent fumigation is the only proven way to eliminate drywood termites — the kind that deals millions of damage to Orange County homes. But that response neatly avoids addressing the complaint, which is sad because it’s easy to address the complaint directly.

Vikane
The chemical gas Vikane, a creation of Dow AgroSciences, kills drywood termites quite effectively. Used by nearly every company that does termite control in Orange County, it acts quickly, leaves no chemical residue on surfaces, and the potential dangers to humans can be easily avoided with proper preparation. The major reason why tent fumigation takes 2-3 days is that the Vikane needs time to seep into all of the tunnels that termites have bored into your wood, and another day to get back out of all of the nooks and crannies of your home. The third day is a safety precaution to give the termite experts time to go in and test to make sure that the termites are dead and that the gas is completely gone from your home.

Pre-Preparation
It might seem odd to have ‘pre-prep’, but there’s a lot of details to take care of when you’re doing something as dramatic as fumigating your home. The pre-prep takes care of everything up to the tenting process.

• Pack a few days worth of goods, because you’re going to be moving somewhere else while the fumigation occurs.
• Tell your neighbors what you’re doing so that they can check to make sure that the termites haven’t spread to their home as well, and they can avoid your home while it’s tented.
• Call the gas company and have them turn off your gas for the 72 hours you’ll be gone.
• Take your car out of the garage. Cars are good at trapping hidden pockets of Vikane, it’s best to just remove that risk.

In Part II, we’ll talk about the tenting preparations.

Steve/Gary,

Thank you very much for getting my deck fixed in order to close escrow in time. I really appreciate it.

Your guys did a great job and were very courteous.  I am going on Facebook and recommending that all my realtor friends refer “RIP” to their clients for their termite control and Termite fumigation services in Orange County.

My agent will also now refer you.

Thanks again

Michele Goessling in Orange County

When termite season hits and you see some winged ants in your front yard you’d be wise to look into fumigation. Orange County has several termite control centers that offer a variety of different methods of eliminating the bugs, but the simple fact is that chemical fumigation is the most effective way to make sure termites don’t damage your home any more than they already have.

Of course, you’d also be pretty wise to be a tad bit concerned about the idea of moving into a hotel while someone filled your home with poisonous gas for an entire day. It doesn’t sound terribly safe, does it? Well, fortunately, fumigation has been used for decades — long enough that the technology has been proven safe and effective.

The process is called ‘tenting’, and it essentially means that the fumigation company puts a huge tent over your entire home. They then replace the atmosphere in the tent with a toxic gas — often a product called Vikane — that kills termites dead. After the process is complete, the Vikane is sucked out of the tent back into a safe container, and the house is left to air out for a day.

After that day, professionals with very sensitive instruments make their way through your home and test for any remaining traces of the fumigant. If there are any, they clean it up, wait another day, and check again. 95% of the time, however, no traces are found and you are invited to return to your home.

Vikane is used by a majority of the companies that perform termite control in Orange County, because it’s relatively safe to non-termite life. It’s so safe that it’s not even a good product if you want to eliminate, for example, bedbugs or cockroaches. The tenting isn’t so much to keep the Vikane out of the neighborhood as it’s to keep it up against the outside of your home so that the termites that might be gnawing on your roof or wood paneling are killed as thoroughly as the ones inside.