I’ll start. Apt next door is having a cockroach infected. 4 days ago, I was playing sims on my laptop, wearing my eyeglasses. Right lens got blurry, took off, huge cockroach was crawling across inside of lens. While I was wearing them. Freak out ensued.

  • over_clox@lemmy.world
    26·
    1 year ago

    Life Pro Tip

    A really cheap and effective way of getting rid of roaches, without even using poison…

    Get a medium to large metal coffee can, or any old metal can I guess. Make sure it’s cleaned out and dry to start with, and is not rusty.

    Then get some spray cooking oil and a few scraps of bread. Spray the inside of the can with cooking oil, then drop some bread scraps in there.

    Now you have a roach trap, set it near where the roaches are generally at their worst, and they’ll crawl out of the walls and into the can to get their munch on, but won’t be able to crawl back out.

    Check it every couple or few days or so, eventually the roaches will start piling up and most of them that have been in there for a bit will end up dying because they’re covered in the cooking oil and apparently can’t absorb oxygen.

    Take the trap as necessary and either dump it in the toilet and flush them away, or if you have access to a bonfire burn pile, bag the little demons up and burn them. Then clean the can out and reset the trap as necessary.

    Even with the worst infestations I’ve ever seen, this tends to eliminate over 99% of them within about two weeks, if not less.

    A few thoughts about the different approaches between my trap vs poison…

    If you poison them, then they just go back into your walls and die, further stinking the place up, is more dangerous to people and pets, and honestly isn’t even nearly as effective as people would hope.

    But roaches are simple and stupid. They’re really easy to trap, and why the hell would I want them going back into the walls in the first place? Especially when I can just flush them instead?

      • over_clox@lemmy.world
        10·
        1 year ago

        The whole method of operation of the trap is to make sure the roaches can’t crawl back out after they get in. So you need a totally smooth surface plus the cooking oil so they can’t climb back out.

        If by chance you were to use a rusty can, that would give them a textured surface to grip onto and likely manage to crawl back out, which would defeat the trap.

        Edit: It probably won’t hurt if the can happens to have only a couple or few small spots of rust, as long as it’s not so rusted as to give them a brown brick road to crawl back up and out. Any which way, the goal is to make sure that once they get in, they can’t get out.