Drywood Termite Treatment Without a Tent

There are really three ways to get rid of drywood termites. Tent the house, treat the spot you found, or treat the whole house without a tent. All three have a place. Here's the honest picture of each, so you can tell which one your house actually needs.

Austin, our termite tech, comes out, looks at what you've found and the wood around it, and tells you which of the three fits your house. No charge to come look.

First, how drywood termites live

Drywood termites live inside the wood itself, and every colony is its own separate infestation. There's no one nest to find. The pile of pellets under your window might be one colony out of several, each one sealed up in its own piece of wood, none of them connected. That one fact decides almost everything about how you get rid of them.

Option one: tent the house

Fumigation companies have been doing this for a long time, and it works. The gas gets into every piece of wood in the house and kills every colony that's in there today. That's the strength of it.

Here's the limit. You're out of your home for a few days with your family and your pets. Everything you eat has to be bagged up or taken out. And when the tarps come off, the gas goes with them. Nothing stays behind in the wood, so the next swarm that lands on your house finds it just as open as it was before.

Option two: treat the spot

This is the cheapest answer, and sometimes it's all you'll be offered. Somebody treats the board where you found the pellets. That colony's handled. The trouble is the ones you haven't found yet, because remember, each colony is its own separate infestation. Treat one, and the others keep eating.

Option three: treat the whole house, no tent

This is what we've done since 2003. We put the treatment into as much bare wood in the house as we can reach. The attic, the crawl space, inside the walls. Once it's in the wood, nothing is known to pull it back out. So it isn't just killing what's there today. It's sitting in the wood waiting for whatever comes next.

You stay home the entire time. No packing up the pantry. No hotel. No tarp across your roof.

Which one does your house need?

In most cases it's the whole-house treatment. But there are houses where the honest answer is a tent, and if yours is one of them, I'll tell you that at the inspection instead of selling around it. That's the whole point of coming out to look.

As for what it runs, termite work goes by the square footage under roof, not just the heated and cooled part. The specifics of your house move that number, which is why I won't quote it over the phone.

Not sure it's drywood? Here's how to tell. Seeing pellets and not sure what they are? Start here.

Related: Tentless termite treatment · How to spot drywood termites · Signs of termites · What termite treatment costs