ou’re enjoying your morning shower when you see them for the first time: ants coming out of the bathtub faucet. The sight can be pretty startling, to say the least, but dealing with them doesn’t have to be an impossible task. Removing the ants from your bathtub and even your home is a relatively easy task as long as you follow a few preventive measures.
How to get rid of ants coming out of the bathtub faucet
The most important thing to remember is that it is extremely unlikely that the ants you see are actually coming out of the bathtub faucet. For ants to have access to the inside lining of your piping, there would need to be some sort of leak for the ants to be able to enter and then begin their climb.
The first and most important thing to do would be to find out where this leak might be, allowing you to find the source of how and where these ants are coming in from.
It is much more likely the ants are climbing up from somewhere else and then entering the piping last minute, but either way, you need to find the source – or at the very least, some common areas the ants are traveling through to get into your home. Once you have a good idea of where the ants are traveling, you can use one of these strategies:
Vinegar
Ants use their sense of smell for directions and to get food. If you disrupt an ant’s ability to smell or navigate, there’s a pretty good chance that the ant won’t make it very long. At the very least, ants aren’t going to want to stick around wherever they can’t smell. Vinegar’s strong acidic properties are an excellent way to disrupt and overwhelm an ant’s senses.
To use, mix vinegar with water at a ratio of 1:1 and then either spray it from a spray bottle in the area you’ve found or get a paper towel, make it damp with the mixture, and apply it all over the place the ants are traveling through. You’ll notice that the ants decrease rather quickly over the next couple few hours.
Lemon Spray
Following the same logic as vinegar, lemons are also extremely acidic and go a long way in throwing off an ant’s senses. For a lemon spray solution, you’ll want to mix 1 part lemon juice with three parts water (lemon is much more potent than vinegar) and then spray or wipe areas the same way you would with a vinegar solution.
Use Ant Baits
Instead of deterring or disorienting the ants, you can also set a bunch of traps for ants to climb into instead. This strategy can be effective if there are only a few ants and if there are flat areas to set the traps down around.
Traps get rid of the ants entirely, so instead of warding them off, there are no more ants to worry about coming into your home. You can purchase ant traps at most hardware or big chain stores.
Why are ants coming out of my bathtub faucet?
The only reasons ants would be coming up your faucet are to get moisture and to find a hospitable area to get food. Their nest is probably not too far away, so knowing where the ants are coming from is crucial.
If the ants are nested inside, maybe an exterminator is a better option. But if the ants are coming from outside, finding a way to seal their entrance and deterring the ones inside is a winning strategy.
How to prevent ants from coming back from my bathtub faucet?
Once you know the source of the ants, applying these strategies will ensure your ant problem becomes a thing of the past. Seeing ants come up your faucet the first time can be a surprising experience, but not one to be overly worried about.
Check out this article next if you are having issues with ants in electrical outlets.
