Orkin Pest Control Reviews

Also, we had one cockroach inside our house by the door and I left a note on the door for her. She responded with a note that said it was okay and if there were any more that pop up, we should let her know. But when I saw her a couple of months ago for a service when I was home, she let me know that cockroaches they tend to show up in cardboard boxes. So, now, my husband and I are very diligent about if we get an Amazon box. We take it out and recycle it really quickly. And we haven't seen any cockroaches aside from that one. Aside from that, we live really close to a creek and, at one point, I kept hearing scurrying and my cats heard it, too. We found out that there was an opening in the vents underneath the house, and a rat had gotten in. So, there was a rat running around under our house. Our Orkin technician was able to get it and there was a dead one under there, too. Since then, we've had no issues.

Every year that's passed since we got Orkin's service, the flare-ups of ants in the house has drastically reduced and we barely have any now. We also had earwigs in the door frames right in the front of our house and they're gone now. We still get ants in the yard but overall, percentage-wise, bugs has gone down at 70%. But they don't do pest control for wild animals, and we have nutria that occasionally come in our yard. And if your neighbors have wasps or any kind of issues, they can't address that either. Other than that, Orkin's service is affordable, personable, non-intrusive, and accessible.

That aside, the Orkin technicians were awesome when I had them. The person who used to come regularly until he had some kind of injury was just very friendly and we were on a first name basis. He would come and play with my dog even. He was nice. I only had one negative experience with Orkin. I needed to switch from every other month to every three months because I did not see the need for their service during the cold weather. I had a very small townhouse and I did not really have issues. It was more of a preventative measure. Orkin gave me a hard time switching and told me “No, you have to wait for the next one.” It was like they were forcing me to do the service every two months or I could not do it at all. They ended up talking to their manager, coming back and saying, “Okay. We'll take care of it.”

It was like pulling teeth a little bit. I'm not unreasonable. It just wasn't logical or reasonable to demand that you have to have the service every other month, especially when I had it for a couple of years already. Any kind of contract would have been over if there was one even. Other than that, all my other experiences were good. I might have just gotten somebody on the phone who had not had that situation before and they didn't know how to handle it. It could just be a training issue.

Price-wise, it was pretty high. That's across the board with pest control in general. My townhouse was 1,100 square feet and they were in there for two minutes, spraying. It seemed a lot to be showing out for two seconds of work. But industry standard-wise, it's fair. The service I have now is even more expensive. I have more square footage so I expected that. It's reasonable.

One time, I had a pair of techs come by. They were filling in because they were low and Edgar may have been ill during that time. When the two other guys came over, they were in and out in five minutes. I'm not really sure what they did but I let it go. Other than that, products or chemical combination they're using is effective and it doesn't bother my animals, which is another positive. Orkin is a remarkable service and they get the job done. It's a roller coaster ride when it comes to bugs and they have got it under control.

Also, I was sold when Edgar said they've been doing business since 1917. He also had educated me on the fact that they take care of hospitals and schools and even some eateries that I go to. Plus, I've noticed a little Orkin, the little sticky boards, the little report cards that they have placed down. I noticed them too in other places. And that makes me feel a little more comfortable because I know what they do at my house. I have a friend who works for another company, and he told me to just drop Orkin and that he'd take care of us. But he charges $5 more than they do. Their online tools are also really easy to understand and explore.

The techs came out and had a program for setting up indoor baited traps. It wasn't way into the wintertime, so there wasn't a lot of snow on the ground even. So, they would have done the outdoor traps too, which they did. They used these traps that have a way that the animal can get into them and there's a lot of these food. They look like small corncobs of molded material that's sort of grain of some nature and of poison mixed in with it, and they fit down over some prongs inside there. So, they could stack about a half dozen in each of these traps. They spotted a couple of places where the critters were coming in. There were more obvious holes. Ultimately, the next spring, I can do tuckpointing, which is not a big deal. I went around and tuckpointed every place where I saw there were gaps in-between the field stones, plugged them all up, which probably, by itself, did the trick.

The tech set out about five bait traps around the house in different spots that either looked suspicious or definitely was one of the places where they came in. And they put out probably about 10 of the baited traps indoors, mostly down in the basement. Everything worked like a charm. The Orkin tech came back about once every four weeks and checked the baited traps. I didn't have any problem. If we did catch one, I could reset it and he told me to use Slim Jims as the bait rather than cheese because it lasts longer. The cheese gets moldy and nasty and the rats are not stupid. It doesn't taste good. They can't just pull them off and they don't get crumbly. These guys are ultra professional. We trapped probably, over the course of the winter, about six rats indoors. In that course of about five months, we trapped plenty of them. Most of them were running towards and eaten up all of the six cob things.

The techs sat on the ground and snapped a lid down on it that latched and then, the critters could get inside. They would nibble on this stuff. It's poison and it also makes them desperately thirsty. So, they hustle back out again looking for some source of water. But snow's on the ground. The tech said there'll never be any animals inside those bait traps because they have this unquenchable thirst and they gotta go out and find water. And sometimes they either drink a lot and they get bloated, and then they can't breathe. We finally decided there were five that weren't even being visited all of that wintertime. So, we disarmed them because I don't want our dog to be sniffing around. The tech said the outdoor bait traps should be left in place all the time and they'll come back on a scheduled basis and check the bait traps.

In the summertime, Orkin also has a service about spraying for wasps and insects around the eaves, around the foundation line and around the windows. They sold us a program that would be six to eight-week spacings, four visits in the summer to do the overall spraying around the house for the insects, primarily wasps, and they would check to see bait traps at the same time. It included this spraying system, which is also a super program that they have. When you sign up with Orkin, there's a service, which has about $100 entry fee, and they have these different packages that you can choose to do. If we had just done the one thing for the wintertime for the rats, and if we then come back later and said we wanted to have them do something else, there's also another one of those startup fees. So, it made more sense to have paid that, and then just pay on the however many visits they're doing per wintertime or summertime.

We're a continuing customer. It's better economically for us. We don't have to pay this startup cost every time we wanna add some program or end one and start another one. After that first winter, we haven't had one trap go off in the places down in the basement where they set them. Plus, we finished the subfloor in addition. There's a crawl space underneath that subfloor and they were able to come up and come through where there were gaps. The plywood hadn't been all laid down permanently. So, Orkin’s programs work. Everything's outdoors now because we don't have to have all of the indoor traps even. But I've kept the ones down in the basement set, and they haven't been set off for all of that time. Orkin is 100% professional operation and it's effective 100%.

Leading up to the time that we hired Orkin, we used to have a nuisance of wasps because they look for a way to get from where they are up in the attic. Sometimes, they can't find a way out and they come through some little crevice and before you know it, you've got two or three wasps. So, all of the things that Orkin has done have been first class and very reasonably priced. They are on time when they say they're gonna come and they call ahead too the day that they're gonna come out to just make sure that that's still on our calendar or it needs to be shifted. I am one satisfied customer.

Originally, my house was a cabin here in the desert and over 40 years ago, I was overrun with silver fish. I had the independent guy come out for that. The desert is full of all kinds of critters, but they're basically outside and I get little water spiders in here once in a while but that's no big deal. But as the years went on, I had my house fully remodeled. I sunk quite a bit of money into it. Since the remodel 20 years ago, there have been several different strains of these Oriental American cockroaches. In the dead of summer, when it's 120 degrees, you can go out there in the night, and there are bazillions of them. They're after water and my yard has 100 trees and a lot of leaf litter. But I'm on the septic system and when they come in the house, they die. They can't survive in the house but they get in. I even duct taped the bottoms of my front and back door every night and I don't even open windows in the summertime.

Once in a while, you'll see one crawling across the dining room floor and I'll kill it. But one or two here and there just get in and the only reason I'm calling Orkin is because I don't want cockroaches in my house. Over the years, Orkin has pounded me so hard with the stuff and then Abraham changes the chemical as per the season requires. I set the sticky traps and I have them everywhere. But in the last two years, my activity for cockroaches inside the house have been way low. I might see a couple here and there that sneak in and on the traps but I can't even remember the last time I saw one in the night. They are contained and I'm very happy. I'm not gonna quit Orkin’s service. I'd give their phone number or the website to anyone looking for service.

The only thing is scheduling a service with Orkin can be frustrating. Sometimes, I talk to one person and the techs talk to me. Sometimes, the information is relayed back but not successfully incorporated into the process, so it takes several iterations before a preference of schedule is actually realized. They schedule by sending an email saying, "Hey, it's about time for your next treatment. And this is when our techs will be in the area, so we'd like to bundle you. And here's the day and time. So, yeah, see you then." If you don't like that, you call back and you say, "Hey, not that day." And that works. If you have a preference for a certain time of day, which is what I like, I tell them, "It can't be in the morning. It has to be between this time and this time." It takes a few iterations of the schedule before it shows up that way from the computer or email that they sent. But once it does, it works.