Peppermint oil, cedarwood oil, and cypress oil are essential oils that effectively keep cockroaches at bay. Additionally, these insects hate the smell of crushed bay leaves and steer clear of coffee grounds. If you want to try a natural way to kill them, combine powdered sugar and boric acid.
Citronella
Citronella not only works great for repelling mosquitos but also cockroaches. While the candles don't work well against roaches, you can use citronella oil as a deterrent. You can mix it with water and use it as a spray or simply wipe down areas with the diluted mixture.
Smells that roaches hate: a quickfire summary
Oregano, rosemary, mint, eucalyptus, lemongrass and catnip are great herby options. Citrus oils work brilliantly too. And surprisingly, lower concentrations – 2.5 parts per hundred – seem to work best as deterrents. Just don't bother with lavender.
Cockroaches have a strong sense of smell. Using natural scents works best to deter roaches. Plants such as eucalyptus, lavender, and mint are smells roaches hate.
It's a fact that cockroaches are afraid of humans and other mammals or animals that are bigger than them. They see us as predators and that fear triggers their instinct to scatter away. However, they dislike strong and distinctive scents such as citrus, peppermint, lavender and vinegar.
Sprinkle boric acid in areas the roaches frequent; when they walk through it, it sticks to them. They later ingest the boric acid, which then kills them. When using boric acid, be sure to limit your exposure; don't place it anywhere that children or pets might find it, as it's toxic when ingested.
Citrus. You may love the smell of fresh citrus, but cockroaches hate the scent. That means you can use citrus scented cleaners in your kitchen and bathroom to chase any lingering roaches away. You can also keep a few citrus peels around your home in strategic places.
Filling a spray bottle with dish soap and water, shaking it, and spraying a roach from above will kill it quickly.
Bleach's Effect on Roaches
Taking a deep drink of household bleach would kill anything, roaches included. But the same strong odor that keeps people from taking a swig of bleach repels roaches as well.
Windex is toxic to most pests, especially spiders. Spraying window cleaner directly onto small insects like ants or mosquitoes will kill them within a few moments. For cockroaches, window cleaner can make them temporarily unconscious so that you can squash them.
Pine Sol, like many household cleaners, such as bleach, is capable of killing a cockroach on contact. In the pest control world, we call these contact insecticides.
The best way to get rid of roaches fast is to sanitize your home, eliminate hiding spots and stagnant water, store food in airtight containers, and use glue strips, bait, boric acid, or liquid concentrates.
Sprinkle the diatomaceous earth around areas where roaches travel and frequent. The sharp particles of diatomaceous earth damage the waxy, protective exoskeleton of the roach, causing it to dehydrate and die, typically within 48 hours of contact.
Anything from food left on bookbinders, small pieces of trash, soap containers, and more will attract roaches. ⦁ Hidden Areas- if there are any areas around your home that are forgotten like old cupboards or small crevices in your walls, these will attract cockroaches.
Gel baits: According to Black, gel baits are the best roach killer option. These are available as either plastic bait stations or gel formulations that come in plastic syringes. The baits contain insecticide-laced foods that cockroaches eat.
Cockroach predators include mammals, avians, amphibians and other reptiles. For example, hedgehogs will eat roaches. Joining the roach à la mode dinner party are geckos, skinks and other species of lizards, frogs, turtles, some types of birds and even rats and mice.
Home remedies like diatomaceous earth, baking soda, boric acid, citrus, essential oils, and borax can be effective ways to get rid of roaches. If you want to take a more aggressive approach to eliminate roaches, glue traps, bait stations, and liquid roach deterrent concentrates are all excellent options.
Baking Soda and Sugar Mixture
Mix a pinch of sugar with some baking soda in a bowl and leave it for the cockroaches. Attracted to the food source (the sugar), the roaches will ingest the poison (the baking soda) and die. It's safe and efficient, but make sure you clean up any dead roaches as soon as possible.
The results of the investigation on what color will repel the greatest number of cockroaches, indicate that red light repels a greater number of roaches than the other five colored lights and the control group of no light. Green light deterred the second most roaches followed by white, yellow, and blue.
Lemon and lemongrass essential oils specifically will drive any cockroach away due to their strong scent of limonene, which smells like nothing else on earth! Add a couple of drops of citrus or peppermint essential oil to a few cotton balls, and lay them around where the roaches in your home congregate.
Roaches are attracted to similar things as any other pest: shelter, food, and water. Anything that makes these things more available and easy to access is going to contribute to a roach infestation.
Distilled vinegar does not kill or repel roaches, making it completely ineffective. Distilled vinegar will help keep your kitchen clean, giving cockroaches less to snack on. However, roaches can live for months at a time without any food at all, and they will eat almost anything to survive.
(You can also use other kinds of mint essential oil as they'll also contain menthone.) Then, spray generously on walls, counters and other surfaces where you've seen cockroach activity. This should be enough to deter roaches, at least for a time.