Residential Pest Control in Palo Alto, CA

Local Context

One Palo Alto Address Can Be a 1912 Shingle and the Next a 1958 Slab

One Palo Alto street can hold both halves of the city's building history. Professorville, Downtown North, Old Palo Alto and Crescent Park hold pre-1930 Colonial Revival, Craftsman and Shingle-style houses on raised foundations, with real attics and sub-areas underneath them. Greenmeadow, Fairmeadow, Charleston Meadow and Los Arboles hold post-war slab-on-grade tracts, part of the more than 2,700 Eichler post-and-beam houses Joseph Eichler built here between 1949 and 1974. Those are two different pest problems in the same city.

On the older raised-floor houses, the recurring calls are drywood termites in the attic framing and eaves, roof rats using the mature canopy to reach a roof, black widows in the sub-area and detached garage, and moisture in a bare-dirt crawl space. On the slab tracts they shift: subterranean termites through slab cracks and plumbing penetrations, Argentine ants at the slab edge and expansion joint, rodents in a ceiling cavity or mechanical chase rather than an attic, and paper wasps under the deep overhangs.

Geography adds the last layer. Houses near San Francisquito, Matadero, Adobe and Barron creeks carry more soil moisture, more subterranean termite pressure and heavier ant activity after the first November rain. Properties on the western edge against Pearson-Arastradero, the Foothills preserve and the Palo Alto Hills take yellow jackets, widows and mice off oak woodland and grassland, especially in late summer. Toward the Baylands the ground is bay-influenced and damp. Same city, three different service plans.