Professional Pest Proofing in Greenwich

Why Proofing Is Priced Separately

Bundling proofing into a treatment fee sounds generous and is usually the opposite. It means every customer pays for it, including the ones whose problem was a single open door on a hot night, and it means the customers who need several hours of genuine work get whatever fits inside a fee that was never built for it. Charging for it separately, by time, is the version that is honest in both directions.

It also keeps the decision with you. After a rat or mouse treatment we will tell you what we found, where the route is and what closing it would involve. If you would rather your own builder did it, that is a perfectly sensible answer and we will describe the work clearly enough for them to quote it.

What Proofing Actually Covers

• Gaps where service pipes and cables pass through walls and floors - under sinks, behind washing machines, at meter boxes and at boiler flues.
• Air bricks with broken, missing or oversized openings, fitted with proper covers rather than blocked up, because they are ventilating the building for a reason.
• Kickboard voids under fitted kitchen units that are open to the subfloor behind.
• Gaps under and around external doors where the threshold no longer meets the door.
• Small holes in masonry, render and around window and door frames.
• Openings at the roofline where they are safely reachable and the repair is a proofing job rather than a roofing one.

What Proofing Will Not Fix

This is the part most companies leave off the page. Proofing is a targeted repair of small openings. It is not a substitute for building work, and there are several situations where the right answer is a different trade entirely:

• Defective or redundant drainage. A broken drain or an unsealed redundant connection is a route into a building that no amount of proofing reaches. That is a drainage repair.
• Roofline and roof covering failures. Rotten soffit, missing tiles, failed verges or gaps at a party wall in a terrace. That is a roofer.
• Structural gaps and failed render at scale. Building work, properly quoted and properly done.
• Shared voids in converted buildings. Where the route runs through a communal riser or a shared subfloor, sealing one flat does not close the building, and the freeholder or managing agent needs to be involved.

In each of those cases we will tell you what we found and describe it clearly. We would rather lose an hour's work than take money for a repair that was never going to hold.

How the Time-Based Price Works

Proofing is charged for a stated period of work rather than as a flat fee, because the amount of work varies enormously between properties. A single pipe entry under a kitchen sink is a few minutes. A ground-floor flat with three open service penetrations, a defective air brick and a kickboard void open to the subfloor is a different proposition.

The practical approach: we look at what needs closing, tell you what can realistically be done in the time, and start with the routes that are actually being used. If more time is needed you will be told before it is spent, not afterwards.

Proofing After Rodent Treatment

The natural sequence is treatment first, proofing second - and for good reason. Sealing entry points while rodents are still inside leaves them in the building with no way out, which is how a mouse problem becomes a smell in a wall cavity. Once the treatment has done its job and activity has stopped, closing the route is what stops the next population arriving through the same hole.