Would Anyone Notice Termites In Your Building?

Termites reach a commercial building through the slab rather than the walls: expansion joints, cracks, and the openings left where pipes and conduit pass through concrete. Once inside, they find cellulose nobody filed under wood, starting with cartons and pallets. The evidence sits at floor level, behind whatever is stored against the wall.

Why A Slab Building Is The Hard Case

Construction type decides most of the risk. The University of Tennessee Extension's subterranean termite publication, PB1344, ranks slab-on-ground as the foundation type most susceptible to termite attack, with the monolithic slab the least likely of the slab types to be penetrated and suspended slabs in between. Where infestation does happen in slab construction, PB1344 names the routes: expansion joints, cracks, and utility and sewer openings.

Nothing on that list involves chewing through concrete. Termites use what the concrete leaves behind, and a building collects those openings on a schedule of its own: joint filler that has gone brittle, a hairline crack that opened after a few winters, the gap around a conduit a contractor ran last spring. Virginia Tech Extension's sheet on the signs of subterranean termite infestation points at the same places and names utility conduits and plumbing connections among the common entry routes.

A house gives this away sooner. Someone sleeps in it, moves furniture, repaints a baseboard. In a distribution building in Canton or an office suite in Akron, the stretch of floor that matters most sits under pallets, filing cabinets and racking that has not moved since it was installed.

The Cellulose Nobody Counts As Wood

University of Kentucky Extension's guidance on protecting a building against termites is blunt about storage: firewood, lumber, cardboard boxes, newspapers and similar materials attract termites and provide a source of food, and it says never to store them against foundations or inside crawl spaces. Read that list again as a warehouse inventory. Corrugated cartons, pallets, packaging stock, paper records.

So a steel frame and a concrete floor are not an exemption. The frame may be steel while the office end carries wood partitions, door frames and trim, and the pallet holding the stock is wood sitting on a slab. Kentucky's second point matters as much as the food: material stacked against a foundation gives termites a hidden route up, and it can let them get around soil that was treated.

Where It Shows Up, And Why It Gets Walked Past

The pattern in that last column is the real problem. Every one of those findings is visible to somebody who walks the building weekly, and every one of them has an innocent explanation ready.

The Two Signs Worth Training Staff On

Shelter tubes are the first. Ohio State University Extension's BYGL bulletin describes them as earthen runways built from soil particles, saliva and feces, run over foundations or through cracks, and they are the one termite sign a non-specialist can learn in a minute. A brown ribbon the width of a pencil climbing a block wall or crossing an expansion joint did not fall there. Our post on what termite damage looks like covers the rest of the evidence.

Swarmers are the second, and they arrive all at once. BYGL notes that an infested structure can produce large numbers of winged adults indoors during a swarming season, so a drift of small dark insects and shed wings on a windowsill or under a light fixture is a finding rather than a housekeeping job. The Ohio History Connection's termite fact sheet puts Ohio subterranean termite swarms in March, April, May and June, with occasional swarms in September and October. October flights are uncommon in Ohio, but they do happen.

Either sign is worth a photograph before anyone sweeps it up, because identification is the whole question and the insect on the floor settles it. Flying ants swarm in this state too, and telling the two apart is an easy comparison once you know where to look.

The Grounds Work That Keeps Them Off The Wall

Most of what reduces pressure on a commercial building happens outside it, and it belongs in a maintenance scope rather than a treatment. University of Kentucky Extension gives the specifications.

• Keep soil off the wood. Kentucky recommends at least six inches between soil and wooden siding, frames and posts.
• Hold the mulch back. Two to three inches is usually enough, kept clear of siding and of door and window frames.
• Consider stone at the wall. Kentucky suggests crushed stone or pea gravel, which termites find less attractive than organic mulch.
• Move the storage. No cardboard, lumber, pallets or wood debris against a foundation or inside a crawl space.
• Deal with the water. An irrigation head aimed at the building, a downspout emptying at the wall and grade that falls toward the foundation all keep soil damp exactly where it matters.

Kentucky is also candid that this is risk reduction and not a substitute for treatment, and calls professional treatment the most reliable form of prevention.

Treating A Building That Cannot Shut Down

This is where a commercial job differs from a house. Operations keep running while the work is done, and the work has to be documentable afterward. Our commercial termite control runs on two methods, and the inspection decides which fits the building: Sentricon baiting, which eliminates the colony including the queen with no drilling and no trenching, or a liquid barrier in the soil. The Sentricon system carries a one-year renewable termite warranty, and State Termite is a certified installer, so the stations are set and monitored by our own technicians. If you want the mechanism first, we wrote up how a bait station reaches a colony you cannot find.

Termite inspections are free, including for a commercial property, and for a facility that is already audited the documentation side matters as much as the treatment. Our commercial pest management programs carry monitoring records and reporting, and the manufacturing and warehouse programs are built for buildings where stock sits on a slab all year. State Termite has worked out of North Canton since 1933 and serves Stark, Summit, Portage, Wayne and Tuscarawas counties.

If you can get to one wall of your building this week, make it the one with the pallets against it. Pull them out, put a flashlight along the slab line, and look for soil where soil should not be. Then schedule a free termite inspection or call 330-494-6199, and we will walk the rest of it with you.