You May Have Roaches and Not Know It

Roaches lurk in dark hiding spaces and wait until human activity is at a lull before they come out to feed. That is why the famous cliche scene on TV exists where the lady comes out for a midnight snack, flips on the lights and starts screaming when she sees a huge cockroach.

Even if you keep a clean house they can be there. They can survive off the tiniest morsels of food that are hard to detect with the human eye. And if you have pets, you most likely have roaches somewhere.

Here are five signs that you may have roaches in your home:

1. Droppings – tiny poo pellets can belong to a roach. They leave droppings as they go and they don’t care about sanitary practices. They will leave them on your food, on your coach, anywhere. This is why a disease carrying roach is so contagious. They go everywhere and leave parts of themselves behind.
2. Smell – If there is a strange odor in your house, this could be roaches. They can be living and breeding in a very secluded spot in your house. Large numbers of them together gives off a smell.
3. Egg Casings – Roaches reproduce by laying eggs. Lots of them. So when the baby roaches hatch, the egg shells are left behind. If you see strange little shells from time to time, you have roaches.
4. Skin shedding – Tiny roaches need to grow and as part of this growing cycle, they shed their old skin. This leaves behind flakes of used roach exoskeleton.
5. Seeing a Live Roach – If you see one during the day, then this means you have a roach problem. The one you see is the outlier of a larger group. I’ve seen a large roach just hanging out before like it was going for a stroll in the park. My guess is that this was an older roach that was at the end of its life and lost its bearing.

If you have roaches, you can try DIY methods and may end up with mixed results. Or, you can call a professional and get it done right from day 1.