How the Rooms Are Counted
The first room is £180 and every room after it is £60, so two rooms come to £240 and four come to £360. A room counts whether it is heated or not: a cellar, an attached or integral garage, a conservatory, a loft room, a shed or a garden store each count as one. Halls, landings and stairs are not counted, even when carpeted and even when the webs are in the corner of one. Anything out of the ordinary, such as a lower-ground flat that runs back under the pavement or a lock-up store, is agreed on the phone rather than reinterpreted on the day. Business premises are quoted for the site instead of by the room.
Choosing which rooms to book
Book the rooms that keep coming back, not the rooms where a spider has been seen once. The test is repetition: sweep a corner down, and if the web has rebuilt within a fortnight, year in and year out, that room is a habitat. A spider in the bath in September with nothing following it is simply the season. Why spiders keep appearing in the same rooms draws the same line in more detail.
What Treatment Can Change, and What It Cannot
Inside a treated room the numbers come down and webs take longer to reappear. That is the honest scope of it. What no treatment can do is stop spiders arriving from outside, because a London home sits in a chain of gardens, alleys, canals and parks that turns out insects and spiders all summer, and nothing we apply indoors reaches across that boundary.
Nor does it change the reason they settled in that room, which is food. Somewhere with a steady supply of small flying and crawling insects will go on attracting spiders whatever is done to the spiders themselves, which is why the useful conversation is usually about the insects rather than the webs. What pest control can and cannot do about spiders is plain about where the limits lie, and anyone promising a spider-free house is selling something that does not exist.
Reducing What They Feed On
The most useful thing most households do about spiders has very little to do with spiders.
- Outside lights by doors, in porches and along communal walkways gather flying insects into precisely the spot a spider wants; switch them off when they are not wanted or fit a warmer-coloured bulb
- Seal the gaps around window and door frames and the daylight under a garage door, which cuts the insects coming in and the spiders that follow them
- Get stored cardboard off the floor and into lidded crates, since the voids between the flaps are the shelter and the dust feeds what the spiders eat
- Take webs and egg sacs down with a vacuum rather than a brush, and empty it into the outside bin
- Cut ivy and climbers back off frames, sills and shed walls
Where one room is unusually busy it is worth asking what is feeding them. Tiny bristly larvae in the fluff along a skirting are carpet beetles, and grazed patches in a stored wool rug point to carpet moths; either will keep a spider population supplied. Whether lots of spiders mean another pest problem looks at that link.
The London Rooms That Build Up
The pattern repeats across the housing stock rather than across the map. Basement and lower-ground flats are cool, dim and close to the soil. Cellars beneath Victorian terraces hold everything that has ever been put down there. Attached garages on interwar semis take insects in from the garden through a door that never quite closes at the bottom. Conservatories and loft rooms stand quiet for months at a stretch. In purpose-built blocks it tends to be the store cupboard, the window reveals and the balcony frames rather than the living rooms.
False widows around frames and sills
The noble false widow is established across London and is the one people ask about: glossy and dark, with a bulbous abdomen and pale markings on top, usually around window and door frames, under a sill, behind an outside light or inside a shed. Bites are uncommon and are generally likened to a wasp sting. Speak to a pharmacist or GP if a bite swells badly or looks infected, and call 999 if there are signs of a severe allergic reaction. Are there dangerous spiders in homes here? goes into the detail.
Where We Work
Spider treatment is available across the 33 boroughs at the same room pricing. Spider Control Brent is the borough page, with the Brent areas beneath it, and Pest Control Brent covers the rest of what we do there. Where a room is busy because something else is breeding in it, flea control or one of the carpet pest pages is the better place to begin. Why there are spiders in the loft and how to stop spiders coming back answer the two questions that follow a treatment most often.
