How Much Does Pest Proofing Cost in Greenwich?

The Published Price

Why This Is Priced by Time and Not as a Flat Fee

Because the amount of work varies more than any other service on this site.

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 entirely. A flat fee that covered both would be overcharging the first customer to subsidise the second.

It is also why proofing is not bundled into the rodent treatment price. Bundling sounds generous and works out the other way round: everybody pays for it, including the people whose problem was one open door on a hot night, and the people who need several hours get whatever fits inside a fee that was never designed for it.

What an Hour Realistically Buys

It depends entirely on what the survey found, but as a guide, the following are the routes that most often need closing and are quick to close properly:

• Gaps where service pipes and cables pass through walls and floors - under sinks, behind washing machines, at meter boxes and boiler flues.
• Air bricks with broken, missing or oversized openings, fitted with proper covers.
• 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.

The practical approach on the day: 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 rather than the ones that are easiest to reach. If more time is needed you are told before it is spent, not afterwards.

What Proofing Will Not Fix, at Any Price

This is the section most companies leave off, and it is the one that decides whether you spend this money well.

• 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 and a drainage contractor will quote it.
• Roofline and roof covering failures. Rotten soffit, missing tiles, failed verges, 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 and blocks. Where the route runs through a communal riser or a shared subfloor, sealing one flat does not close the building. The freeholder or managing agent needs to be involved, and a report describing exactly which penetrations are open is what makes that conversation productive.

In every one 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.

When Your Own Builder Is the Cheaper Answer

Quite often, and we will say so.

After a rodent treatment we describe every route we found and what closing it would involve. If you already have a builder, or the work is straightforward and you would rather have it done alongside something else they are doing, that is a perfectly sensible answer. The description we leave you with is written clearly enough for them to quote from.

What we will not do is imply that proofing has to be done by a pest control company. It does not. What matters is that it is done properly, that ventilation is preserved, and that it happens after the treatment rather than before.

The Sequence, and Why It Matters Financially

Treatment first, proofing second. Always.

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 - and that is a considerably more expensive problem than the one you started with, because it usually involves opening up plasterwork to find it.

Where Proofing Is the Best Money on This Site

In houses, particularly the interwar and 1930s stock across Eltham and the estate housing further out, rodents are frequently incomers rather than residents. Activity that starts in October in a property that was quiet all summer points at an entry point rather than an established colony.

In that situation, one proofing visit is usually cheaper than a second rodent treatment next autumn - and considerably cheaper than a third the year after. For a landlord with a property that produces the same call every year, it is the obvious spend.

A Worked Example of What an Hour Covered

Prices in the abstract are hard to judge, so here is a realistic picture of a typical ground-floor job following a mouse treatment. It is an illustration of the kind of work involved, not a promise about your property - what yours needs is established at the survey.

1. The kitchen. Two service penetrations closed - the waste pipe under the sink and the gap behind the washing machine. The kickboard void was open to the subfloor at the back and was closed along its length.
2. The external wall. One air brick with a broken face, fitted with a proper cover so it still ventilates the floor void.
3. The back door. The threshold no longer met the door and the gap was closed.
4. The meter box. The cable entry behind it was open and was sealed.

What was reported rather than done: a gap at the roofline visible from the garden, which is a roofer's job, and a suspect inspection chamber, which is a drainage contractor's. Neither was charged for and neither was patched around.

That last part is the point of the whole exercise. The work that gets done is the work that will hold.