Tentless Termite Treatment vs. Tenting

By Coby McConnell, owner. In pest control since 1986, treating drywood termites without a tent since 2003.

Tenting kills what's in your house right now. A whole house tentless treatment kills what's there and leaves the wood protected against what tries to come back. That's the real difference, and it's worth understanding before you sign anything.

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The inspection is free. Austin has run our termite work since 2013, and he's the one who comes out, looks at what you've actually got, and tells you straight. If it turns out you don't have termites, we'll tell you that too, and you're out nothing.

What tenting actually is

Tarps go over your whole house. Then poison gas gets pumped inside, along with chloropicrin, which is a warning agent so anybody nearby knows to stay out. The gas fills every space in the structure, including the places nobody can reach by hand. It kills what's living in there. All of it.

I'm not going to knock fumigation. It's effective, it's fast, and there are houses where I'll tell you it's the right call. If your home is loaded with colonies, I'd take the tent all day long. Not because it's more effective. Because it's quicker. If you're weighing one, here's the real cost of tenting a house in Tampa Bay, not just the price on the quote.

But here's the part that doesn't get explained often enough. The moment that tent comes off and you can go back in, the termites can go back in too. The gas leaves with the tarps. There's nothing left behind in your wood. Nothing protecting it. Your house on the day after fumigation is just as available to the next swarm as it was the week before.

What a whole house tentless treatment is

We treat as much bare wood as we can reach. The attic, the crawl space, door frames, inside the walls where we can get to it. Electrical stays untouched, obviously. Concrete block isn't something a termite can eat, so that's not a concern either. Everywhere the wood actually is, that's where we work.

We use more than one product at the same time, and each one has a different job. Borates soak into the wood itself and stay there for decades. Nothing is known to take them back out. Transfer products work another way entirely. A termite walks through it and doesn't even know, because it isn't repellent. It carries the product back to the colony, and the colony goes down from that one contact.

So you get two things happening at once. What's in your house right now dies. And the wood itself becomes something termites can't live in going forward.

Not all tentless is the same

This is the part I really want you to hear, because it's where people get burned comparing quotes.

Very few companies treat the entire house. Most do a spot treatment. They go to the spot where you found pellets, they treat that, and they leave. And look, that spot treatment will kill what's in that spot. But every other piece of untreated wood in your house is still untreated wood, and if there's a colony three rooms over that nobody found yet, it's still there doing what it does.

That's why a spot treatment costs so much less. It's a lot less product and a lot less time. It's not that anybody's cheating you. It's that you're buying two different things and they've got the same words on the invoice.

So when you're getting quotes, ask one question. Are you treating the whole house, or are you treating where I found them? The answer tells you what you're actually comparing.

Difference number one: what's left behind

This is the whole thing, really. Fumigation kills what's there. Tentless kills what's there and then keeps working.

If your neighborhood is 30, 40, 50 years old, termites are going to try to come back. Every year, for about 60 to 90 days, they swarm. Whether they land on your house depends on which way the wind was blowing that day. That's biology. It's not a failure of anybody's treatment.

Here's why it holds up anyway. The products already in your wood don't go anywhere. A new termite shows up, takes a bite of wood that's already treated, and dies before it can start anything. That's the point of using something that stays put instead of something that only kills what's there the day you do it.

Difference number two: you never leave

Tenting means three days out of your house. Bagging up your food. Boarding your pets. Finding somewhere for your family to sleep, which for a lot of folks means three days at the mother-in-law's.

It also means things you might not think about until they happen. If you've got a pool cage, the screens come off. If you've got shrubs against the house, they get cut back or they die under the tarps. And there's a two hundred pound man dragging a two hundred pound tarp across your roof, which is its own conversation.

With tentless, you stay. We've treated homes with a customer on oxygen. Homes with a fish tank in the room. Pets, kids, everybody stayed put. We'd rather you step out of whatever room we're working in, but that's the extent of it. You sleep in your own bed that night.

When I'll tell you to tent anyway

There are houses where fumigation is the better answer, and I'll say so. If a home's gone untreated for years and built up dozens of colonies, maybe more, finding every one of them takes time. Sometimes a lot of it.

I had a customer years back with what turned out to be hundreds of separate colonies. It took us over five years to track down the majority of them, a handful of new locations each time we came back. Those weren't new infestations. They were existing ones we hadn't found yet on the first pass. I don't believe it would take that long today. Our system's come a long way since those early years. But I'm telling you so you know what the honest range looks like.

When a home's in that kind of shape, I'll sometimes recommend fumigation instead. And if that's not a fit for your situation, pets, somebody on oxygen, whatever the reason, we'll take care of it the tentless way. It just means being upfront that it'll take some time to find everything, the same way it took time for the problem to build up.

Here's the other side of that, though. If you want it done tentless, that's what we'll do. Nothing else matters if that's the call you've made. And the reverse is true too. If you want a tent, you should have a tent.

The building that convinced me

We've been doing tentless whole house treatments since 2003, so more than twenty years now. Instead of just telling you it works, I want to tell you about a building where we got to prove it.

Years back we were fortunate enough to treat the Belleview Biltmore out in Belleair. If you don't know the building, it was once billed as the largest occupied wooden structure in the world, and it was a real piece of Florida history. The original structure dated to 1897, built out of native Florida heart pine.

Years after that original treatment, the property was down to a preserved section of that 1897 building, and I got called back to give a proposal on treating it again. I quoted the whole section. The response caught me off guard. They said no, we don't need you to treat all of it. I asked what they meant. They told me they couldn't find any termites anywhere in the existing wood. All they wanted treated was the new wood going into the rebuild.

I'll be honest, that stopped me for a second. Not because the request was strange, but because even I didn't expect our original treatment to hold up that well, that many years later.

What this means for your house

The real question underneath all of this isn't which method is better. It's how many colonies you're actually dealing with, and what you need your life to look like while we handle it.

If you've got two or three colonies, we treat everything and you're in great shape fast. After the first five years with no activity, we see next to no problems. After many years past that, it's about as close to guaranteed as pest control gets.

And that's only true because of the warranty. If the bugs come back, so do we. Find termites during your warranty year, you call, we come back and retreat at no additional cost. Keep it current and we'll keep protecting your home, and you can carry that for life if you want to.

But I can't tell you which one your house needs from here. Nobody can. That's not me being cagey, it's just the truth of it. We come out, we look, and then we tell you straight. The looking is free.