White Ants

[JBY]

Hi guys & girls,

Ive signed a contract on my first Queensland property which Im going to live in for a little while, but will make it an investment property in the long term. I had the building and pest inspection done today and Im still awaiting the report. I was very briefly at the property when the B&P inspector was there. The property has fibro walls and a corrogated iron roof, is only 6 years old, and is built on steel poles set in concrete. There are two tree stumps underneath the house that the builder did not remove for some reason. The inspector looked underneath the house and did not see any evidence of white ants at present but said that they had been there previously. One of the stumps had a metal box attached which I think he said was 'bait' or some sort of white ant deterant. He didn't seem to think it would be an issue for them getting into the property (as far as I know white ants dont climb steel poles!).

I dont have a lot of experience of this sort of thing so I thought I mention it here. I dont want to get paranoid about white ants, and I guess they are an issue for many houses in Queensland. But they are a potential costly maintenance issue at the end of the day. The way I look at it with this property is that on the downside the stumps are probably a magnet for white ants, but on the upside is the fact that the property is high up on steel poles, so that they cancel each other out, if you see what I mean. I dont really know how these metal box bait things work - how reliable are they in your experience? Presumably they have to be updated or changed X amount of times a year? A costly exercise? How often is a good time to get regular inspections? Im just trying to get an idea of how this will impact on holding costs, not that Im overly worried about this at the moment. Otherwise the property seems ok so far.

Cheers.

 

[jaycee]

Hi JBY,

Good description of the problem & your concerns,helps immensely.

I kow nothing of Queensland & termites, how prominenet they are etc, so others/yourself can fill that part in.

temites are subeterrainean (sp?) and live in nests... so they only clu=imb out of their nest to find & bring food (wood) back home tothe rest of the family.. so this emans there may be a nest anywhere under the ground... fact of life you can really do nothing about...

So what we do is check properties we buy to make sure they have been eaten out by termites andfind out if there are termites active & how treatable/big the problem might be...... If no active termites are found, you can find out how much to "protect"the property and see if it's higher than other similar proeprties might be because of any particular reason.

Termites may hae visited and left many houses.

The metal box / bait sounds either like a bait to attrat them & then posion them later , or a staight box of "posion" (arsenic if they still use it) to contiminate the woood and they take it back home and go to sleep

Fact that they were there before alone is not an issue, excepting for any Qld circumstances I am unaware of.

 

[RumpledElf]

Contrary to popular belief, termites don't get in and eat your entire house in 10 minutes either. I was recommended bait for my old house - they take it back to the nest and feed it to the queen or something.

My old house is 130 and has spotty termite damage pretty much everywhere non-structural (the roof is made from hardwood beams that are almost a foot thick, no termites there) like the architraves and skirtings. They are really random, they come in and eat a few inches of skirting, wait a few years, eat a bit of architrave, wait a decade and eat some more etc. Funny little things, but annoying as hell when you find them. The house I'm in now had quite extensive termite damage in the floor joists and floorboards - pain in the butt to fix, that was. They'll eat all the softwood first before they go for hardwood, or at least hte local variety here does.

Should be ok up on stumps though, as long as they're all capped and so forth. Old stone houses with the bearers on stone subwalls are the problematic ones.

 

[jaycee]

Elf.

Certianly takes time to eat a whole house, look whow snall they are

Whn a pest controller says he found termites and hell get rid of them, all reputable ones will bait a spot they are eating to posin the wood theytkae back to the nest. If he just sprays the wood, all it will do is kill of f the ones that were in that spot at the time. Other ones wont go and eat that pecie of wood either, they'd jst happily keep eating whatever else they were working on (dont think they all leavae the nest in 1 line and only eat 1 peice of wood, these are ants remember.... Once baited the pest controller comes back and checks and if not dead yet, retreats or whatever... Length of time depends on the property and termites and how hard the pest controller mthinks it will be for the bait to work... So the "Baiting" thing is how they alwyas treat them (basically)


Remember though, what's stopping other termites finding their way over to your place and eating stuff ? That's where the barrier around the house so they cant climb into it comes in. Cant stop em existing & moving around underground.

 

[wylie]

I am not at home to find the number but do a search on my name and you will find Wayne creed of rifle pest control's phone number. Give him a call. He is an owner/operator who can answer any of your questions. He knows his stuff and has been doing our houses for a long time.