I have an ant infestation and I spray windex to kill the swarms of tiny ants but it takes so much to kill ants that the carpets, walls, and grout turns blue from the dye in the commercial window cleaner.
Do you know if I just buy ammonia and mix it at the correct percentage that it will still kill ants without staining my carpets blue?
What percentage of ammonia would you use? Do you know HOW ammonia kills the ants?
Is there a better way to kill an ant infestation?
Windex isn't ammonia you idiot. It's alcohol!
Forget all of these nonsense quack cures. Go to any hardware store and get some TERRO. It will get rid of ALL the ants, not just the ones you happen to see.
It doesn't at my house.
Terro bait stations work wonders, but are expensive. Ortho Home Defense spray is excellent -- water-based, odorless.
Expensive?
The little 1 ounce bottle is still available. I just posted a link to it in this thread. You don't actually have to put it ON anything. I just put a drop here and there directly on the floor along baseboards where they migrate. It doesn't seem to hurt the floor. It's not toxic to pets or babies, so it doesn't really need the containers.
Back then the active ingredient in Terro was arsenic.
Now you can get it
Nowdays the active ingredient is boric acid. Still kills ants pretty well, but it's a lot less hazardous to have around the house than the arsenic was.
HellT
Yup. Terro is it. It used to just come in a bottle and you had to apply it to cardboard or those plastic ant traps that don't work. Now you can get it in little plastic containers that you snip a hole in the bottom so the ants can get in. They go in, sup of the poison, then take it back to kill off the colony. I put some containers out in April and I've watched at least 5 different colonies get wiped out. Tiny red ones, and 4 sizes of black ones. One container was completely full of giant black ants one morning. I only noticed it because the container was actually moving, due to all the ants inside. They emptied that container in 2 days, which is VERY fast. I never saw them again.
You're not killing the ants with ammonia. You're drowning them with liquid. A spray bottle of water will have the same effect.
Same way ammonia kills you.
Clean your house. Get rid of any exposed food or put it in sealed containers. Vacuum up crumbs. Take kitchen scraps and plate scrapings straight to the trash barrel outside. The ants are there because there's food. Remove the food, and the ants will not have a reason to be there, and they will go away.
Kill any stragglers with REAL ant killer. RAID.
Yep, use an ant bait.
Be careful about calling someone an idiot.
While alcohol is its primary active ingredient, it does contain a small amount of ammonia (unless you get the vinegar version). Note the reference to having a slight ammonia odor. Its label also states "with Ammonia-D" - an SC Johnson trade name for some type of aqueous ammonia compound..
Boric Acid is real cheap. Any hardware store will have it.
I had a friend who lived in Hollywood and she had a cochroach problem that was insane. I was afraid to go in her apartment. I bought some boric acid and applied it. A couple of days later she called to tell me the roaches were still there and they seemed to be even bolder. I went over a day or two later and then she told me they were starting to die. What she thought was boldness was actually the roaches walking around dazed and dying. I sat in her apartment and you could hear them falling from the walls and hitting the floor, tic tic tic tic... She was having troubles keeping up with the corpses, she was sweeping up dustpans full.
She was not really a dirty person, she lived in Hollywood.
Slightly soapy water will kill most insects, but even then I would not recommend spraying anything onto a carpet.
Have you tried a product bait that contains boric acid? Ant traps? "Tero" is one such product and it worked well for me.
I found Terro is very inexpensive. It's really just boric acid and sugar syrup.
There is some ammonia in Windex and similar products, which is why it kills ants, but it is cheaper/better to just spray an ammonia solution. It is interesting that ammonia is not listed in the materials safety datasheet you reference, but it is definitely there.
Ammonia solution is the best way I have found to kill ants interior to a residence, since it not only kills them on contact but neutralizes the formic acid they leave on their trails for other ants to follow.
For ants external to a residence, I like Grant's ant stakes.
Steve
Yeah, bleach is a GREAT thing to get on the carpets.
Maybe the carpets are already white? :-)
Rod Speed, ye weedy dull earth, I do not like thy look, I promise thee, ye tooted:
I've only seen it in little trays that look kind of like cheez-n-crackers packs for maybe a buck each. I tried mixing borax with corn syrup, but it didn't work. Little bastards clearly know the difference.
For instant gratification, you can't beat Home Defense. Well, you can, but Raid stinks.
Yeah, right.
They also go after water and some of them, apparently, just like marching. I can see no other reason they'd come in from behind a faucet, march around the rim of the bathtub, and then leave.
Raid stinks and leaves oily spots. Use Home Defense.
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