Termite Control in Dallas

Termite Inspections, Bait Systems and Liquid Treatments for Dallas Homes

All-Safe Pest & Termite has treated termites in Dallas since 1984, from our office on Municipal Avenue in Plano, and the termite work is the half of the company name that people forget. Our technicians are licensed for structural termite control by the state, they run Dallas routes every weekday, and on a termite call the first visit is a proper inspection with an infrared camera, not a walk-around with a flashlight and a quote on a clipboard.

Dallas gives termites two kinds of house to work with. Most of the city is slab-on-grade over Blackland clay, and the clay's habit of shrinking every August opens gaps at the slab edge and around every pipe that comes up through the floor, while the soaker hoses that go on to stop the shrinking keep the soil at the foundation damp all summer. The older neighborhoods, Lakewood, the M Streets, Kessler Park and parts of Oak Cliff, sit on piers with a crawl space underneath, which is a different inspection and often a different treatment. This page is about which treatment fits which house, and when the honest answer is to wait.

Looking for expert termite control? Call (972) 945-9226 or reach out online today, the first visit is a walk around the property with a written price, not a sales call!

Bait System or Liquid Barrier: Which One Fits Your House

There are two ways to treat subterranean termites, and a lot of the confusion homeowners feel comes from companies that only sell one of them.

A liquid treatment puts a treated zone in the soil around the foundation. The technician trenches along the outside of the slab, drills through concrete where a patio, porch or garage slab is poured against the house, and treats the soil with a non-repellent product such as Termidor or Premise. Termites can't detect it, walk through it, and carry it back to the colony. It works fast and it's the right call when there's active feeding in the structure right now. What it can't do is tell you anything afterward. Once it's in the ground it either holds or it doesn't.

A bait system puts stations in the ground around the perimeter and lets the termites find them. The colony feeds on the bait, carries it home, and dies over weeks to a few months. Our stations use a colony elimination system with the active ingredient in place from the day they go in. Bait is slower to clear an active infestation than liquid, but it keeps working, it's inspected on a schedule, and it doesn't require trenching a landscaped bed or drilling a patio. On a pier-and-beam house in Lakewood, where the crawl space makes a full liquid treatment awkward, bait is often the better fit. On a slab house with no current activity, bait is prevention that reports back.

Active tubes and feeding in a slab house usually means liquid at the foundation, with bait around the perimeter afterward if you want the ongoing monitoring. No activity and a house you intend to keep usually means bait alone. We'll tell you which you're in, and why.

Swarm Season in Dallas, and the Two-Minute Check

Eastern subterranean termites swarm in Dallas from late February into May, on the first warm, still afternoons after a rain. The swarmers are dark, about the length of a grain of rice, with two pairs of wings the same size that they drop within minutes of landing. What most people see is not the swarm but what it leaves behind: a scatter of pale wings on a windowsill, in a spider web on the porch, or along the bottom of a sliding door.

The check takes two minutes. Look at the sills of the windows on the sunny side of the house and the track of any patio door. Look at the brick where it meets the ground on the shaded side, behind the shrubs and beside the air conditioner pad, for a pencil-width line of dried mud. Look in the garage where the slab meets the wall. If you find wings, put a few in a bag; ant wings come in two sizes and ant waists are pinched, termite wings match and termite waists don't. If you find a tube, don't knock it off. Leave it so we can confirm it's active. Then call and say what you found, because a house with tubes goes to the front of the schedule and a house with a few wings on the porch can wait for the next opening. Our swarm season guide covers what happens in the next 48 hours.

Here's the honest part. A swarm in the yard, or wings on the patio, proves there is a colony somewhere near the house. It does not prove the house is infested. Colonies live in stumps, landscape timbers and the soil around old trees, and a swarm from one of those is a reason to inspect and probably to install bait, not a reason to treat the structure. A swarm coming out of a wall, a window frame or a door jamb is a different thing, and that one is a same-day call.