How many of you would like to have inside pest control without having the service man ever coming inside? No more rushing home at lunch to meet the tech. You wouldn’t need to leave the key in a flower pot or under the mat. Your home would still receive a professional, even treatment without all the hassle. For many, this is a valuable service that they had built right into the home.
Tubes in the wall have been available for some 10 years now, maybe longer and it is recently becoming more popular. Realtors include it in the listing when marketing a home, building contractors actually advertise it as a feature product much the same as thermal windows or appliance upgrades and more importantly people are asking for it by name when searching for a place to live.
One caveat is that it must be ‘built’ into the home during original construction. Installing the 
system on an existing home is very costly and unless you were gutting the house to remodel it would not be worth it. Tube systems consist of very small plastic tubes that run through the walls to all the control points such as around plumbing areas, doors and windows. The tubes have tiny laser cut slits in them every few feet. (Some tubes vary) The tube shoot portal is located outside usually in a small plastic box that looks very much like an electric socket.
The premise of the system is pretty simple, high pressure air (co2) is shot through the tubes first to clear the tubes and open the slits. The co2 also acts as an agitator, bugs don’t like it and it helps to flush them out a bit so they come in contact with the residual insecticide. Liquid pesticide is then shot using co2 as well. The air and chemical mix whizzes through the tubes and shoots out of the slits in a fine mist. Each tube is shot the same way and some are color coded to signify where they go. Yellow usually means plumbing areas and you may want to give that an extra burst.
On a normal service the tech would also treat the outside perimeter giving you a complete barrier. Since bugs travel the voids of the walls as we’ve seen in our pest proofing series the idea is to stop them before they ever see the light of day. The tubes are only for voids however so spaces like the attic or crawl usually will not be treated. Also it doesn’t help much for that occasional pest that wanders in and is resting nicely on the kitchen counter.
Overall it is a valuable service that most people swear by and would insist on having if they were to move to a new home. It’s a real win win situation in that the service personnel never runs late and the home owner gets a good quality service without ever having to be home.
