Rung 1 — Exclusion & sealing
The cheapest pesticide is a sealed gap. Exclusion is the work that keeps working after every treatment has faded.
Methods drawer
Methods, plainly explained
Every treatment sold to a homeowner is one of eight ideas, used well or badly. This drawer explains each one in the desk's own order — the order of the IPM ladder, least intervention first.
The methods drawer, in ladder order
The eight files are numbered as rungs of the IPM ladder — least intervention first. The ladder page itself is filed last, as the map of the whole drawer.
Rung 2 — Sanitation & moisture control
Food, water, and shelter: remove any one of the three and most infestations shrink before a product is opened.
Rung 3 — Trapping & monitoring
Traps answer the questions treatment guesses at: what is it, where is it, and is it gone yet?
Rung 4 — Baits — and why spray ruins them
A bait works because the pest eats it and shares it. Anything that makes the pest avoid the food, or kills it before it gets home, defeats the design.
Rung 5 — Dusts & desiccants
Dry powders that keep working for years inside a wall void — and do nothing at all if they get wet or are piled where the pest can walk around them.
Rung 6 — Residual treatments
A spray that stays active on a surface after it dries: useful at thresholds and harborages, wasted as a ritual, and harmful when it fights the bait.
Rung 7 — Heat treatment for bed bugs
Raise the whole room past the temperature bed bugs and their eggs cannot survive, hold it there, and monitor every corner. Simple to say; unforgiving to do badly.
The whole ladder — The IPM ladder
Integrated Pest Management, in the order this desk applies it: identify, exclude, remove, monitor — and only then reach for a product, starting with the least toxic that will do the job.