Elimination Guide – How to Get Rid of Silverfish in Your Home

Silverfish (Lepisma Saccharina) infestations can be pesky and embarrassing. But there are effective ways to solve the problem quickly and prevent silverfish from coming back permanently. In order to tackle the problems, consider the following questions.

What are silverfish?

Silverfish are quite an invasive species of arthropod. They are armored with a hard exoskeleton, and are long and thin.

Where do silverfish live?

Outside silverfish are found under leaves or mulch and are not often seen. Silverfish prefer the living conditions we create in our homes. In a house they could be hiding in a cereal box, under the sink, in the bathroom, in closets, or anywhere in the house where there is at least a little bit of food or moisture. Silverfish don’t need a lot of moisture to survive, but a small amount is needed for them to thrive. Eliminating a significant amount of moisture in your home is one effective step in getting rid of silverfish.

Adding a dehumidifier to your furnace or purchasing a standalone dehumidifier for your home will help eliminate the moisture that silverfish love. Installing fans in areas where water may settle is also beneficial.

Learn how to spot problem areas for silverfish in your home

Because of an abundance of food in most kitchens, silverfish are often attracted to the kitchens of homes, and live under the sink due to the moisture there. Fixing a leaking pipe could mean all the difference in ensuring that silverfish are not living under the sink. Silverfish are far more active at night and move very quickly making them sometimes hard to spot.

What do silverfish eat?

Because they are long and thin this can be challenging and they can often be found hiding in the spines of books, or behind your wallpaper, because they love feasting on the glue in both.

Silverfish are also fond of starchy foods and foods that contain polysaccharides. They also eat fabrics including linen, cotton, silk and rayon. This makes closets a good source of food for silverfish.
ll stay in one area once they find a food source and will only move on when it is gone. Another important step in eliminating silverfish is to control their food supplies and set up traps in the areas that they are feeding or nesting.

Should homeowners with silverfish problems hire an exterminator?

It may seem like the only alternative when one finds a colony of silverfish in their home. A trip from the exterminator can significantly reduce a silverfish problem but it doesn’t arm the homeowner with anything if the bugs return in the future. If they don’t kill every bug and every egg these bugs can breed quickly (in just 20-40 days) and are able to reproduce year round. It could cost several hundred dollars a visit, and involve more than a couple of exterminator visits. There are alternatives that give you the knowledge to exterminate these bugs and rid a home of silverfish fast.

What do the best online guides cost?

Online guides typically go for $30-40 dollars depending on the product. Be sure your guide is within that price range or lower because there are many products priced in that range that work wonders in silverfish elimination. Beware though there are guides that are not safe for children or pets and that use harsh chemicals, while being less effective in the long run. The best part about purchasing a guide is readers get a step by step plan on how to do the extermination themselves. An online guide has a lot of value because of the money people save in doing it themselves.

Are the treatments safe and effective?

Yes, you can save a lot of money, by learning the permanent natural solutions to silverfish elimination. The treatments found in many online guides are children and pet friendly. Beware though there are guides that advise readers to use chemicals such as boric acid or pesticides. Educated consumers choose a guide that teaches about natural and safe methods for the job.

Learn How to Eliminate Silverfish Insects with a DIY Guide

There are guides online that make silverfish extermination an easy, DIY job. Silverfish are a pest in many homes. Their hard exoskeleton makes them quite difficult to squash, and they breed! They breed really fast.

In as little as a month their population can increase significantly and one silverfish can turn into an infestation quickly. Think about the following points:

Know where the Silverfish live:

To start on the extermination, the exterminator should know the common places to find these pests. It should be easy for an educated person to identify the problem areas in any home. For example, silverfish need at least a little bit of moisture to survive. Therefore, problem areas in many homes are under their sinks, in their bathrooms, and in their basements. These areas tend to be dark and damp, the preferred living conditions of silverfish.
Control the food supplies:

Silverfish love starches and eat at the glue on wallpaper and books. Starches like cereals, crackers and other starchy foods should always be sealed tight from critters such as silverfish. You may consider taking down your wallpaper and painting if you notice an infestation behind your wallpaper. Online guides contain secrets to ridding your bookshelves of silverfish, and ways to keep your wallpaper minus the silverfish.

Forget the pesticides and the boric acid:

If you are considering an online guide for silverfish elimination, then be sure the guide doesn’t recommend boric acid treatments or that you purchase pesticides. These treatments can be harmful to the inhabitants of a home, such as pets or children. There are all natural treatments for silverfish infestation.

Make sure your Silverfish Elimination method is foolproof:

Exterminators don’t like to talk about how their visits may be ineffective and how you may need to cough up money for as many as two additional visits to alleviate the problem. They make no guarantee that the first extermination or extermination treatments that follow will get rid of all the silverfish. This is because they concentrate on killing the bugs but do not exert much effort towards disrupting breeding cycles, or controlling food supplies. Exterminators simply don’t inform customers enough about how to KEEP THEIR HOME BUG FREE. They kill all the bugs in the places they spray their pesticides but infestation can continue and bugs can become resistant to pesticides or the pesticides may be washed away or become less effective over time.

How to Get Rid of Silverfish

Silverfish are a real pain to get rid of. They are long-lived, breed like rabbits and are very resilient in general. If you lay down poison, you may kill most of them off, but eggs and hidden bugs will soon have them reappearing around your home. If you want to know how to get rid of silverfish once and for all you first need to understand their breeding and living cycles, so that you can interrupt it.

Silverfish Breeding

Few insects are as long-lived as silverfish – they can often live up to 2 or 3 years, and the females will continuously lay eggs their entire lives. One female will give birth to hundreds of offspring during her life.

They lay their eggs hidden away in nooks and tiny cracks, making them almost impossible to detect and destroy. If you just go ahead and poison as many silverfish as you can, you might kill off most of the adults, but the offspring will soon hatch and if your house or apartment is still a good home for them, they will soon be thriving and growing in numbers once more. So first, you have to make your home very inhospitable to them.

Silverfish Habitat

These insects naturally live in the wild. They are attracted into people’s homes when good living conditions and a good source of food is offered. Silverfish love moisture, in fact they need it to survive. And they also like the dark, and warmth, but not extreme temperatures.

If you have any area of your home with lots of moisture, you need to dry it up and dehumidify very humid areas. These sorts of places are often in the attic, if you have a leak, or perhaps in the basement – you can ventilate these areas. The bathroom is a favorite place of residence, offering plenty of moisture behind the toilet, under sinks, and anywhere if you let the shower splash all over the floor.

In the kitchen you can find silverfish in cupboards, behind the sink or fridge or in the pantry if you have one. Go around your home, filling in cracks and reducing moisture in any way you can. Do the hovering and cleaning diligently. And then the next step is to remove the source of their food:

Silverfish Food

Silverfish love to eat anything containing starch, which includes the glue in book-bindings and wallpaper. You need to fix or redo peeling wallpaper well, and seal all your reachable books in tight containers. They also love paper in general, from magazines, books or any other source.

And silverfish eat plants too, but they hate light, so you can just make sure your plants are positioned in well-lit areas and they should be safe.

Another favorite food-group for silverfish is the cotton and silk in your clothes – so don’t leave laundry lying around in heaps, and seal up your wardrobes, make sure there are no entrance cracks at the back.

Finally, silverfish will eat many of the foods we do to. In particular: grains, cereals, sugary things and flour. Seal up all these foods tightly. And you should be ready for the poisoning stage.

Killing Them Off

When your home is clean, dry, dehumidified and generally inhospitable to these little bugs, it is time to kill them off with any of the many poisons available out there. You can choose any of the many poisons or traps, most of which use boric acid to kill them. As a more natural solution salt is surprisingly effective. Make sure you get it in all the dark corners, cracks and crevices.

San Antonio Pest Control Companies are found here:

Jenkins Pest and Lawn @ http://jenkinspest.com/pest-control/

Home Solutions Pest Control @ http://homesolutions-pestcontrol.com/pest-control-2/

More Info here: http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/keyword/silverfish