Cockroaches can infest your household in any season. They’re the world’s most hated pests, so read on to find out home remedies to get rid of cockroaches!
Cockroaches, one of the most common pests in the world, are attracted to your home in search of food and water. They don’t just sit around and look ugly, but they also carry germs and bacteria that are detrimental to your health. Some of the common contaminants and defecation of these cockroaches might be allergens to you or your pets. Not only do these creatures smell, but they can damage your books, wardrobes, and shelves. You need to sort this problem out as soon as you find it because cockroaches reproduce rather rapidly. It’s better to nip the problem in the bud when their numbers are limited. The products available in the market might also possess contaminants that are detrimental to you or your loved ones’ health. Alternatively, you can try some of these listed home remedies to get rid of cockroaches, whenever they spring up.
Tips to Keep Roaches Away
If you keep your house clean and tidy, these roaches will not find sense in attacking your household.
- Seal up all the cracks and holes.
- Fix water leaks, if any.
- Make natural cockroach bait.
- Call in an exterminator.
- Cockroaches hate low temperatures. Keep your home cool!
Home Remedies to Get Rid of Cockroaches
1. Peppermint Oil
Peppermint is a natural repellant and insecticide that drives away insects. Compared to those annoying aerosol sprays sold in stores, why not make it at home using peppermint oil and water? This spray doesn’t cause any interference in your lives and is safe for you and your children to breathe in. Since it smells pleasant, you can even use this in your car too.
A good spray is a mix of 300ml water and 15-20 drops of peppermint oil. It forms an immiscible liquid that can be sprayed around dark corners and near organic wastes to reduce their attraction to cockroaches.
2. Borax
For the hard to kill cockroaches or the truly resilient ones, use this inorganic insecticide that’s been widely regarded as being a potent cure-all for cockroach infestations. Boric acid present in borax dissolves the cockroaches’ gut from within, killing them instantly. Cockroaches might be getting immune to commercial pesticides, but the borax will do the job.
3. Bay Leaves
The smell of bay leaves is repugnant to cockroaches and other insects. Cockroaches can’t stand it. Just placing a few of these around corners will help in getting the cockroaches away from your home. If you cannot grow your own, buying them from the store is always an idea. For added measure, crush the bay leaves and spread them around the household to get rid of infestations.
4. Catnip Spray
Over the past 50 years, catnip has been regarded as a reputed insect repellant. Nepetalactone, an active ingredient in catnip, bothers the roaches and drives them away. The catnip plant leaves can be used as a potent instrument to get rid of cockroaches. Boil a handful of Catnip leaves in two to three cups of water, refrigerate the steeped solution, and keep it stored in a spray bottle. Spray around the house and where you find cockroaches to drive them away.
5. Neem
Neem is a medicinal and ayurvedic plant with a ton of health benefits, and one other use for neem leaves is to ward off cockroach infestations. Sprayed on cockroach nests, this powerful chemical can sterilize the cockroach eggs to prune their population naturally. Using neem extracts in a spray bottle, you don’t need to move out of your house from calling an exterminator.
To do a neem cockroach cleanup, all you need is a handful of neem leaves, one liter of water, and a spray bottle. Crush the leaves (preferably add a couple of bay leaves into the mix) into a liter of water and mix well. Dilute this into a spray bottle and spray around corners of your house and damp areas. This gets rid of cockroaches!
6. Silica Aerogel
Silica is a desiccant. Which means it dries out anything that it comes in contact with. Cockroaches are slightly watery creatures and have an outer coating that prevents moisture from drying out. When a cockroach comes in connection with this reagent, it’s moisture dries out, making this one of the most effective ways to kill roaches around the house.
Just mix some sugar with silica aerogel (to attract the roaches to the compound) and sprinkle it around the corners of your house. Be sure to place it in corners where your pets or children cannot reach it as silica is poisonous to ingest, even for humans or their pets.
7. Diatomaceous Earth
Diatomaceous earth works on the same principle as silica aerogel mixtures, drying out the cockroaches from inside out. Some grades of diatomaceous earth contain powdered silica, which is poisonous to inhale, so find a variety that is safe to use around the house.
Add some sugar to the mixture to attract the roaches, so they come to the area where this is kept as bait and dry out. This method might need a few re-applications as diatomaceous earth can be used up by consuming moisture from the air.
8. Listerine Spray
Menthol, thymol, and eucalyptol, present in Listerine, make it a natural repellant for cockroaches. It also smells very fresh and minty! Just pour Listerine into a spray bottle and hose down roach nests, dark corners, and damp areas.
9. Coffee Trap
Moist coffee grinds can be used to take care of the visible roaches around your house. Take fresh coffee grinds in a jar and leave it in a place where it’s accessible to roaches. The smell of coffee would attract the roaches, and they would be trapped in the jar. Supplement this method with some of the other ones on this list for maximum benefit.
10. Lemon
Lemon is a very effective cockroach repellent. You can use both lemon juice and peels to ward off cockroaches from your house. Cut a few lemons up in half and juice them into one liter of water. Use this mixture to wipe clean all surfaces, and the strong citrus smell will keep them away from your surfaces.
11. Baking Soda and Sugar
Just take a pinch of baking soda and sugar in a saucer or a shallow cup, and place it near roach-infested areas. The sugar in the mix will attract roaches to consume it, and baking soda will burst their stomach from the inside by creating a high volume of gas.
12. Essential Oils
There are several other essential oils than peppermint oil that you can use as a natural roach repellent. Some of the other oils that you can use in a water spray are:
- Cypress oil
- Cedar oil
- Catnip oil
- Oregano oil
All of these smells are hated by cockroaches and are a surefire way to get rid of pesky infestations. They also smell nice and keep the areas fresh and rejuvenating to live in.
13. Ammonia
This one is a method to kill cockroaches rather than repel infestations directly. It seems like an ideal mix for an ammonia cockroach solution is equal parts ammonia and water in a spray bottle. Sprayed on cockroaches, the solution kills them in minutes. This is great for smaller cockroach infestations or when they’re just starting since it can prevent more cockroaches from laying eggs. However, if your infestation spans in the range of more than a hundred cockroaches, it might be wiser to call in professional help.
14. Cayenne Pepper
Ground-up cayenne peppers are also an effective way to repel cockroaches. Furthermore, for more efficacy, you could grind up cayenne pepper with garlic and onion in a bowl and boil the mix in water for ten minutes. This forms a spray solution that you can use directly in roach-infested areas. It works wonderfully to repel and dislodge roaches from their nests.
15. Petroleum Jelly
Petroleum Jelly is a great way to create cockroach traps (when you’re using an attractant method) as it lines up the insides of your trap jar with a slick surface. Consequently, cockroaches will not be able to escape out of the jar by climbing out of it.
16. Dish Soap
Dish soap works differently than other cockroach repellents. Sprayed directly on to cockroaches, a dish soap solution (one-part dish soap to five parts water) is a heavy fluid that blocks the pores of insects and cockroaches, suffocating them from inside. But this solution might also kill the helpful insects around your house, like huntsman spiders that themselves kill cockroaches and house flies.
17. Cucumber Peel
Cucumber peels can be used as a cockroach deterrent when fresh, and cockroach bait when aged. Cucumbers don’t attract cockroaches (because of a chemical called trans-2-nonenal), and aged cucumber peels act as bait. Put fresh cucumber peels in areas where you don’t want cockroaches going, and when they start to age, put something like diatomaceous earth on them to act as cockroach killers.
18. Vinegar
This isn’t a cockroach repellent or a roach-killer, but it can be used to keep the surfaces clean and tidy, so roaches aren’t attracted to open areas of your house. Vinegar kills salmonella, the disease-carrying germs that cockroaches lob around in your house.
19. Cedar balls or Chips
Cedar balls and chips possess a harsh smell that humans might like and cockroaches detest. Used in and around corners where roaches might infest, these chips can deter cockroaches and other bug infestations like moths and fleas too.
20. Bleach
If cockroaches infest within any piping or drainage systems in your house, pour some bleach down the pipes which work like poison for the roaches when their bodies soak it up. It might not be the most cost-effective way to get rid of roaches, but it does the job pretty well. However, used on carpets, bleach might cause bleach stains. Therefore we only recommend using it for piped up cockroaches.
21. Cornstarch
To create a cornstarch based cockroach killer, mix Cornstarch and Plaster of Paris in a bowl. Sprinkle this mixture into nooks and crannies, cracks, and crevices of your home. Cockroaches will eat this mixture and then die.
22. Ice Cream Trap
You can use a partially-eaten ice cream container as an effective roach trap. Sugar naturally attracts cockroaches and leads them to the container. But when the ice cream melts, cockroaches get trapped in the thick liquid that they cannot get out of. Most roaches will not make it out alive from this trap.
23. Chrysanthemum Flowers
Pyrethrins, the active compound in Chrysanthemum Flowers, attacks the nervous systems of insects in direct contact. This paralyzes the bugs almost instantly. Consequently, this is an excellent way to get rid of not just cockroaches, but also ants, ticks, lice, fleas, and bedbugs. The way to use Crysanthemum flowers is by drying some flowers up, crushing them down into a powder, and mixing the powder into a liter of hot water. This spray is an effective and potent bug killer. You can spray this directly on to infestations and visible cockroaches.
24. Beer and Bread Trap
Cockroaches like beer! Who would’ve known? Use this information to prepare a trap for cockroaches. Take a round-lip jar and slather the inside of the jar with petroleum jelly. Take a beer-soaked piece of bread and place it inside the jar. The smell of beer will attract the roaches, and they will fall into the trap, never to get out.