Are DIY Pest Sprays Safe?
Quick-kill DIY pest control products are not always the best choice for your home if safety is a concern for you. Cheap DIY pest control products are readily available for purchase at many grocery stores or online. These products have been popular in the past not just because they are cheap, but also because people liked the products’ immediate on-contact quick-kill result.
More and more homeowners today are moving away from cheap quick-kill products and switching to products with long residuals for a few reasons, the most prominent being safety (see are DIY termite sprays safe).
Quick-kill DIY pest control products are not always the best choice for your home if safety is a concern for you.
Cheap DIY pest control products are readily available for purchase at many grocery stores or online. These products have been popular in the past not just because they are cheap, but also because people liked the products’ immediate on-contact quick-kill result.
More and more homeowners today are moving away from cheap quick-kill products and switching to products with long residuals for a few reasons, the most prominent being safety (see are DIY termite sprays safe).
Each product will vary in its active ingredient and how it works, but in order to achieve an on-contact kill, most DIY pest control products use neuro-toxins that attack the target pests’ nervous system causing immediate paralysis and eventually death.
Here’s the thing. Did you know that 60% of human DNA is identical to fruit fly DNA? ( See source ) At the molecular level, there are many similarities between the cellular makeup, biology, and function of a bug’s nervous as in your own nervous system.
This means that a quick-kill pest DIY control product that causes damage to a pest’s nerves and neurons, will likely also cause damage of some kind to your nerves and neurons.
While the proportions between the amount of neurotoxins it would take to paralyze an ant versus an adult human are drastically different, adverse effects in children, the elderly, or otherwise susceptible may result from even small amounts of exposure to neurotoxins.
Prolonged exposure to small amounts of neurotoxins spread over a period of time may also cause adverse health effects in healthy adult people.
Long residual, non-contact-kill, products also vary from product to product on their active ingredients and how they work. However, most of these products rely on active ingredients that disrupt or inhibit their target bug’s digestive system, not their nervous system.
When insects come in contact with these products, there is no immediately noticeable effect. In general, long-residual products are designed to inhibit a bacteria, enzyme, or protozoa essential for the target pest’s digestion.
Over time, target pests are unable to extract necessary nutrients from what they consume in order to support normal metabolic activity and daily function.
In social pests such as ants and termites, long-residual products offer the additional benefit of lasting control in that the bugs themselves will share the pest control product with the colony when they share food or communicate making it more likely to achieve control of the source and not just the scavengers and foragers of a colony.
Besides the fact that most readily available quick-kill DIY pest control products pose threats to people’s nervous system, they also tend to be packaged as flammable aerosol sprays.
Pesticides themselves are not flammable, but when packaged in aerosol sprays they can contain flammable products such as butane or propane to help push out the pest control product in the can. Flammable gases make up about 40% of the contents in DIY pest control sprays.
For example, a standard 17.5-ounce can of roach spray contains about 0.27 liters of flammable chemicals in liquefied form. When sprayed, this translates to about 68 liters of flammable gas (See source).
Single DIY pest sprays are not likely to start a fire or cause an explosion in your home unless you have a bored middle schooler looking to create a quick blowtorch at home. However, unloading several full cans of pest spray at one time does present a significant fire risk especially in enclosed rooms.
Bug bombers or bug foggers are riskier because they are designed to fully empty their contents into a sealed area in a short amount of time.
Setting off too many at once in a secluded area does dramatically increase the risk of fire or explosion like the time in 2008 a New Jersey man blew up his apartment when he set off 16 “bug bombs” to get rid of ants and roaches. (See source).
Non-quick-kill products with long residuals are mixed with water only and are as non-flammable as water.
DIY pest sprays are easy to find and often cheap to acquire. Before deciding to purchase and apply these products at home, consider the attached safety risks these products come with when deciding if these products are best for you.
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