Garbage disposals are really convenient for dealing with food waste. Unfortunately, if they aren’t cleaned often enough, food can build up in the drains attracting all sorts of pests.
An uncleaned garbage disposal will attract insects, including cockroaches. Garbage disposals should be cleaned at least once a month with bleach and boiling water. You can also prevent bugs by running a little bit of hot water through the disposal after each use.
How Does The Disposal Attract Cockroaches?
When you use your garbage disposal, food starts to accumulate slightly in the plumbing. Thus food produces a smell that all sorts of scavengers love. From rats to ants, little creatures looking for garbage will come after that smell.
This combination of food and moisture is especially attractive to cockroaches, which can only survive about a week without water.
Even if you keep your sink clean, if you aren’t cleaning the plumbing as well roaches will have everything they could ever want.
This is because there are only three things in the world that cockroaches want: Food, water, and shelter.
A dirty garbage disposal will provide all three, with food stuck to the walls of the pipes, water from the sink, and shelter in the form of the space just underneath the sink.
If a cockroach finds this perfect storm of good things, then you can be sure that they aren’t going to leave unless at least one of those three disappears.
How Do Cockroaches Get Into Your Sink?
Because cockroaches need water badly, they are known to navigate through sewer pipes and plumbing.
However, if there are roaches in your sink, it’s pretty likely that there are roaches in the rest of your house as well. If that is the case, they probably just used their gross little cockroach wings to fly into your sink.
Either way, the roaches are there now and you need to deal with it.
How To Prevent Sink Roaches
In order to prevent roaches from finding your sink attractive, you’ll need to keep food off of it as much as you can.
One great way to do this is to restrain yourself from pouring things like grease or eggshells into your garbage disposal.
These kinds of waste products are difficult for the disposal to thoroughly break down, meaning that they’re more likely to get stuck in the pipes.
But even if you’re only putting the intended foods in the garbage disposal, it still needs to be kept clean. Plumbers recommend pouring a cup of bleach down the sink and following it with boiling water.
This breaks down any food stuck in the drainpipes and washes it down to the sewer. This should be done at least once a month.
You should also run hot water down the disposal after every time you use it. This also helps to keep the pipes clean, as well as flushing away non-roach insects.
Finally, once a week you should pour just a bit of rock salt down the drain. This will serve to help dislodge any food that’s been stuck in there during the week, making your sink a less appealing target for roaches.
You can then prevent roaches from getting into your house through the sink using a rubber stopper for the sink drain after you’re finished with all of your sink work for the night.
You should also make sure not to keep your garbage can near the sink. The combination of moisture from the sink and food from the garbage will for sure attract cockroaches.
Try keeping the garbage in a different part of your kitchen. Newspapers and old cardboard are also bad things to keep in, near, or under your sink, as cockroaches find those to be fantastic hiding places.
How To Deal With Sink Roaches
The reason the roaches are in your sink is primarily water. If you have sink roaches, the best thing you can do to get them out of there is to keep your sink as dry as you possibly can.
Every night, after you’re done washing your dishes, you should take a towel and completely dry up the inside of your sink. Without water, the cockroaches will probably leave your sink to go to a more wet part of your house.
You’ll also need to check under the sink for any leaks in the plumbing. Cockroaches don’t care where they get their water from, so if there’s any source of moisture near your sink you can expect the bugs to congregate there.
However, the sink roaches aren’t the real problem here. The real problem is probably that your whole house is full of roaches. To permanently solve the sink roach problem, you’ll need to solve your house roach problem.
In order to do this you’ll need to get rid of every source of food, water, and shelter for the roaches in your house.
This will include rigorously cleaning the floors, counters, and tables in your home, keeping your garbage can airtight, and sealing up any cracks or holes you may have in the walls.
Even with every precaution taken, you’ll still need to actually kill the cockroaches in your house. There’s a reason people expect them to survive an apocalypse, and it isn’t their charisma.
In order to fully exterminate the remaining creatures, you’ll need to be strategic. Poisoned bait can be useful if you’ve gotten all of the rest of the food out of your house.
Cockroaches will eat the poisoned food and then die, spreading the poison to the other roaches who cannibalize their corpses.
You can also use Insect Growth Regulators to prevent the bugs from being able to reproduce. When used in conjunction with poison bait they can be quite effective for shrinking infestations down to a reasonable size.
Boric acid can be very useful for dealing with infestations as well. You can mix boric acid with flour, sugar, and water to make a dough, then leave it around the house. Roaches will eat the dough expecting food, and then die from the acid.
Of course, the best thing you can do is call an exterminator. Exterminators are trained to deal with infestations safely and quickly. Just remember that once they’re done, it’s your job to keep the house clean and prevent any future infestations.
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