Add one common ingredient to windows and doors to repel ants

Ants are a pest you likely don’t want in your home. However, they are constantly searching for food, water, and shelter, which makes houses an attractive target.

They can easily enter through small cracks and gaps, following scent trails left by scout ants to find food, and they often go after sugary or greasy substances. 

Once inside, they often invade kitchens, pantries, and other areas where food is stored, sometimes in large numbers, which can make them tricky to control and therefore, get rid of.

Certain species, like carpenter ants, can even cause structural damage by burrowing into wood. 

Additionally, their persistence in returning after initial removal efforts, as well as their ability to quickly form colonies within walls or hidden spaces, makes them especially challenging and frustrating to deal with in a home environment.

If you’ve identified that ants are a problem where you are, you may want to get rid of them using a chemical-free method.

TikToker @daddybrownn shared a method to “keep ants out of your house,” without “any harmful chemicals”.

First, it’s important to “know where they’re coming from” and locate the source of the problem. But he said if you can’t identify where they’re coming from, you can use natural repellents “around the whole perimeter of your house, or every door, every window”.

He then listed the things you can use to try and deter ants, saying: “You can use salt, baby powder, lemon juice, chalk, bay leaves, cinnamon, or you can use peppermint oil which also repels spiders”. 

When deciding what to use, you should do your research to check that it’s not toxic for your pet. For example, he warned: “Peppermint oil is toxic for dogs.”

“You’re simply just gonna sprinkle these items wherever they’re coming in, or if you don’t know where they’re coming in, you can sprinkle them in the doorways […] on your windowsills.

“If they try to come into your house when you put one of these things down, they’re gonna smell it, they hate it, and they’re not gonna use that as an entryway anymore,” he reassured.

Dried ground coffee can also be sprinkled to make a “barrier” that they won’t be able to cross easily.

“They hate the smell and they’re not even gonna want to cross it, and they can’t,” he shared.

If you notice a problematic ant hill near your home, and notice many ants in and around your house, you may want to make the decision to call pest control, rather than trying these at-home methods – especially if the ant is a stinging or biting type.