Around Brisbane, termites present a serious risk to homeowners. The city’s warm, moist environment is attractive to the moisture-seeking pest, particularly in the summertime. As a consequence, there’s not a single home in or around the city that isn’t at risk, which leaves many homeowners asking one, simple question:

How can you check for termites yourself?

When you’re considering your home’s termite safety, the most important thing to remember is that you need to remain vigilant. While it is extremely easy and immensely critical that you make sure our folks in the blue shirts come out to professionally check your home once every year, you need to remain vigilant in your day-to-day life to make sure you’re minimising the risks and helping to keep your home safe from termites.

While performing your termite checks, you’ll want to keep an eye out for termite mud tubes. The most dangerous termite species are subterranean, and will only surface for either food or moisture. However, to protect themselves from the harsh environment on the surface, including both the heat and their predators, termites will fully enclose themselves in moisturised mud tubes, which means you shouldn’t expect to see the termites themselves, just their mud pathways.

Checking your home for termites is as simple as regularly moving around the circumference of both the house and the property itself, checking for signs of mud tunnels. These mud tunnels can be found running up out of cracks in concrete, between timber battens or over the top of your ant capping, and you might even find them running along your fence line or any loose timber on your property, including retaining walls. Importantly, you should also keep an eye out for both small and large termite nests being built in your garden, as these can present a significant threat to your home.

If you cannot find any evidence of termites around your property, you should also perform a check for conducive conditions to deter them from making an appearance later on. The most common thing that attracts termites to homes is moisture, as this is a critical resource for the vermin. You’ll be able to identify whether or not your home is presenting termites with an attractive source of moisture if you can find a routinely dripping tap, a roof gutter that has rusted through, or any other consistent source of water in one spot including hot water system and air conditioning outlets.

Once you’ve dismissed every possible sign of both active termites or conducive conditions, you should also check to make sure there haven’t been any termites that have snuck into your home and begun dealing damage. Generally, termite damage can be quite difficult to spot, as they will remain encased in timber the same way they do with mud, leaving only a thin veneer of paint behind in extreme circumstances. Because you spend a lot of time in your home, this damage may be hard to spot, as your mind is constantly updating its idea of what your home looks like, mentally incorporating the damage as ’normal’. Fortunately, that is a problem easily fixed by simply getting a fresh pair of eyes in, such as our team, and going out of your way to check for damage yourself, including tapping the wall in search of hollow sounds or looking for any bubbling paint or bulging skirting boards.

When you work with the Conquer Termites Northside team, we make sure we do everything we can to find any termites on your property. Our team has access to an expansive array of tools to help us find the pests, making sure we don’t miss anything. We use thermal imaging cameras to spot any termites that have settled near a source of moisture inside your walls, as the cameras can detect both large heat sources and cold traces. Once the thermal imaging camera has given us an idea of the size of the outbreak, we have multiple non-invasive or invasive options as to how we proceed, ranging from using a Termatrac that uses microwaves to measure movement inside the walls to drilling a tiny hole in your wall and using a borescope to peer inside to evaluate the termite risk.

Having said that, there is no tool more important in the fight against termites than constant vigilance. It’s crucial that you maintain your yearly checkup schedules to make sure there are no termites hiding out of your sight for months and months on end, and you need to maintain your own checkups to try and keep them off of your property entirely. Thanks to the pervasive threat that termites present throughout Australia, and especially considering the risk they pose in Brisbane, minimising the damage they can deal is sometimes just as important as preventing it altogether. Thankfully, if you’d like to make sure termites can’t harm your property, the Conquer Termites Northside team can help. To speak with us, call our team on (07) 3356 8801 today.