Pest-control is one of the biggest challenges commercial building owners and maintenance inspectors face.
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Pests pose a two-way threat to a commercial building. They can damage valuable items like carpets and furniture. Moreover, rats, mosquitoes, and roaches are a health hazard to clients and employees inside the building.
Ensuring that a commercial building is pest-free demands routine maintenance from commercial building contractors. They are experts in eliminating pests and limiting their growth in building facilities that are most susceptible to pests. Apart from this, there are certain pest control activities you can practice as a building owner. We have listed down a few for you to get started:
Drain the Dumpsters
Make sure the dumpsters aren’t placed right on the entry and exit points. This would reduce the risk of spreading diseases due to flies. Moreover, have the dumpsters emptied once every week. Stagnant garbage attracts flies and mosquitoes. Also, have your maintenance inspector check if the dumpsters have tight lids.
Landscaping for Pest Control
Improperly clean lawns, unnecessary vegetation, and open garbage bins outside the building are open invitations to rodents and flies. Establishing a pulverized rock boundary some feet from the building’s outside limit pest entry.
Moreover, ensure that the water drainage of the building is working optimally. If you have a rainwater harvesting plant in your building, ensure that the water is collected at least some distance away from the building.
Double Check Food Storage
Whether they are restaurants or general offices, food is consumed in most of the commercial buildings. So, it must be stored in tight containers of glass. In restaurants, one residue of rat in the food can shut the business permanently and even cause legal trouble to the management.
General offices have break rooms where employees consume snacks, lunch, or dinner. If the leftover food is present in the drainage pipe, it becomes an easy breeding ground for cockroaches and rats. Moreover, the break room must be cleaned daily with pest-control chemicals so that pests do not find their way inside.
Seal cracks or holes in the walls
Commercial buildings are usually big. They have several walls and plenty of hiding spaces for pests. Once the pests get inside the building, it becomes extremely tough to remove them. To avoid long-term pest problems, it’s important to ensure that the pests don’t find their way inside in the first place.
This requires you and your building-staff to be proactive. For example, you can ask your night guards to watch out for holes or crevices in the outer building walls. If they find any, you can seal them up immediately with steel wool or caulk.
This applies to office remodeling as well. In fact, remodeling is the best opportunity to remove the existing pests in your building. As the interiors are opened up, you can get your maintenance inspector to do a thorough inspection and remove any pests they find. A better way can be asking your commercial remodeling contractors to do it for you. They are experts and will ensure the pests don’t bother you again.
Hire an experienced pest control agency
Simply hiring a pest control agency and hoping to get rid of the pests isn’t advisable. Not every pest control agency has the expertise & knowledge to effectively eliminate pests from the building. Moreover, the pest control process requires meeting various regulations like HACCP, FDA, AIB, or USDA. Your pest control agency should help you with the regulations.
The agency will understand which industry your business falls in, the rules applicable in that industry, and the documentation involved. These legal formalities need to be done right to finalize a pest control project. Without an experienced agency, you may find it tough to do these processes yourself or take time to be done with them.
Wrapping Up
Pests can hamper the growth of your business and, in some cases, damage its reputation. Taking them lightly or ignoring them would mean opening doors to bigger problems in the future. Use the tips mentioned in this article to eliminate pests permanently from your commercial building.