Most people buy pest control without knowing what a good visit looks like, and then judge the result in the first week. These pages explain what actually happens, why a method is chosen, and how to tell whether it worked.
Read in order they answer a single question: what am I buying, and how do I know I got it?
The visit itself
- What actually happens during a visit — a useful first visit is mostly inspection, and should take longer than the treatment.
- Before and after: a practical checklist — what to clear, how long to stay out, and the one cleaning mistake that undoes the whole visit.
Method: why the technician chose that
- Gel bait or spray? — spraying kills what it touches; baiting reaches the nest. For German cockroaches and indoor ants, spraying makes the job longer.
- Reading the label — active ingredients, registration numbers, and four questions that get a straight answer.
- Safety with children, pets and pregnancy
When it does not work
- Why pests come back — five specific causes, and three questions that tell you which one applies before you pay for another visit.
Choosing and paying
- How to choose a company — eight checks, and the answers that should make you look elsewhere.
- What a quotation should tell you — the seven items that make two quotes comparable, and why the cheapest is often the largest.
- One-off treatment or annual contract — it depends on whether the source is inside the boundary you control.
- Indicative price list
What the law requires
- Pest control regulations in Vietnam — product registration, what a contractor should be able to show, and where fumigation is different.
Know what you are dealing with
Method follows species. If you are not sure what you have, start with the identification pages: cockroaches, ants, rodents, termites, mosquitoes, bed bugs.
Book an inspection
Site inspections are free of charge and carry no obligation. A technician walks the property, identifies the species and the harbourage, and sends a written quotation with the method and the schedule — normally within one working day.
Request an inspection · All services · Guide for renters
What the technician is actually looking for
An inspection is not a search for insects. Insects are the symptom; the technician is looking for the four conditions that let a population exist, because those are what the treatment has to remove. Harbourage — a warm, enclosed, undisturbed space: a cabinet void, an appliance motor housing, a bed frame joint, the gap behind a plinth. Food, which for a German cockroach can be grease film behind a cooker and for an ant can be a single spill under a fridge. Water, which in this climate is almost never absent but is concentrated at drains, under sinks and around air-conditioning condensate. And a route — the gap, pipe or shared void that connects your property to the population.
That is why an inspection of a one-bedroom apartment takes fifteen to twenty-five minutes and why a technician who walks in, sprays and leaves in ten has not done the part that determines the result.
Gel bait, residual spray and dust: what each is for
Gel bait is placed in cracks and voids in small dots. The insect eats it, returns to the harbourage and dies there, and others feed on it in turn — so the effect reaches insects the technician never saw. It has no odour, needs no re-entry period, and is the right tool for German cockroaches and most ants. Its weakness is that it is slow and that wiping the surface removes it, which is why aftercare says not to clean inside cabinets.
Residual spray leaves a treated film on a surface that insects cross. It is the right tool for perimeters, skirting, service voids and outdoor hard surfaces. It needs surfaces to dry before re-entry, usually two to four hours, and it is the wrong tool inside a kitchen cabinet or on anything a person touches all day.
Insecticidal dust goes into deep voids — wall cavities, behind sockets, under floorboards — where nothing else reaches and where it stays effective for a long time because it never gets wet. It is applied in very small quantities and it should never be visible when the technician leaves.
Why the second visit exists
Almost every treatment failure people describe is really a missing second visit. Insecticides kill insects; they do not reliably kill eggs. A German cockroach ootheca carries thirty to forty eggs and hatches two to four weeks after it is laid, which means a population that looks eliminated at day ten can be visibly back at day twenty-five. The second visit is timed for that hatch. Skipping it does not save half the cost — it wastes the first visit.