How to Get Rid of Spiders in a Greenwich Property

Start With the Three Free Ones

In order of how much difference they make. If you do these and the problem resolves, you have saved the cost of a treatment - which is a perfectly good outcome from our point of view and we would rather tell you than not.

1. Change the outdoor lighting

The single most effective intervention available, and almost nobody does it.

Spiders are where the insects are, and insects are where the light is. Bright external lighting near doors, windows, porches and loading bays pulls flying insects in all night, and the webbing accumulates exactly there.

Reducing what is lit, moving a light away from a doorway, putting it on a sensor rather than leaving it on, or using a warmer light does more for a long-term result than anything we could apply.

2. Clear the webs properly, and keep doing it

A brush or a vacuum with an extension, going into ceiling corners, window reveals, external door surrounds, frame edges, under furniture and along skirtings. Include the egg sacs - a pale rounded silk parcel in or near a web - because leaving them means the population re-establishes from exactly where it was.

Done once, it looks better for a fortnight. Done monthly, it substantially reduces the population, because a spider that has to rebuild constantly in a place with no accumulating catch tends not to stay.

3. Close the gaps

Spiders come in from outside, so the same openings that matter for everything else matter here: gaps under external doors, unsealed gaps around frames, air bricks with broken covers, and openings around service pipes. It will never make a building spider-proof, and it reduces the traffic.

Then Decide Whether Treatment Is Warranted

If the three above have been done properly and webbing still returns within days across multiple areas, that is a genuine population and treatment is a reasonable next step. If they have not been done, treatment is being asked to compensate for conditions that are still in place.

What Treatment Actually Involves

Not chasing individual spiders around a room. Two components:

1. Webs and egg sacs are removed first. This is not tidying - it is the part that prevents re-establishment from the existing population, and doing it after the treatment rather than before would waste both.
2. A residual treatment goes to harbourage and the runs between. Frame edges, ceiling junctions, window reveals, roof voids, cellar structure, door surrounds and external entry points - the places spiders sit and the routes they use, rather than open floor and wall surfaces.

The Limitation, Stated Plainly

No treatment makes a building permanently spider-free, and anybody telling you otherwise is overselling.

Spiders come in from outside through the same gaps everything else uses, and they will keep doing so. Treatment plus web removal reduces the population that is established. The lighting, the insect supply and the webbing routine are what keep it down afterwards.

That is why, for commercial premises, this is normally a planned programme rather than a one-off - and why for a house it is usually the free measures that matter more than anything we do.

Where Treatment Is Genuinely the Right Answer

• Commercial premises with an operational standard to meet. Warehousing, storage, workshops, food premises and hospitality frontage, where webbing is a hygiene, presentation or audit issue.
• Cellars, garages and outbuildings with a dense established population that returns quickly.
• A large or partly unused property where clearing webbing manually is not practical.
• A genuine and persistent phobia. Where a treated, sealed, web-free property makes a real difference to somebody's ability to use their own home, that is a legitimate reason and we do not treat it as trivial.

What Does Not Work

• Conkers, essential oils and similar remedies. There is no good evidence for any of them, and they are recommended constantly.
• Ultrasonic plug-in devices. Same position as for rodents - no good evidence.
• A general spray of open wall and floor surfaces. Spiders sit at edges and junctions, not in the middle of a wall.
• Killing every spider you see. Cellar spiders in particular prey on other spiders, so a corner tangle web is doing some of the work for you.

And a Word for the Autumn Callers

If it is September, you have seen two or three large spiders in a week, and the webbing situation is otherwise normal - nothing needs doing. It is mature males looking for a mate, it happens in every building in the country, and it will stop on its own within weeks.

A glass and a piece of card is the correct treatment, and a towel over the edge of the bath saves you the trouble.

A Monthly Routine That Replaces a Treatment

For most houses this is genuinely the answer, and it is worth setting out as a routine rather than as advice, because the difference is doing it consistently.

1. Ceiling corners in every room, with a long-handled brush or a vacuum extension.
2. Window reveals, frames and behind curtains.
3. External door surrounds, inside and out, including the porch.
4. Under and behind furniture that does not move, and along skirtings.
5. The garage, shed, cellar or utility area - the reservoir spaces, and the ones most often skipped.
6. Take the egg sacs, not just the webbing. This is the step that makes it cumulative rather than cosmetic.

Fifteen minutes a month. Combined with dealing with the outdoor lighting, it does more than an annual treatment would, and it costs nothing - which is the honest position even though it is not a sales pitch.