The Hunter house, annotated
Pick the house that looks like yours and check the numbered spots, including the termite-prone ones.
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The prevention guide, PL. 06
What makes a house termite-friendly
Termites are not looking for your house in particular. They are foraging for moisture and timber, and they take the first easy invitation they find. The trade word for those invitations is conducive conditions, and happily most of them are habits around the house, not the house itself. Here is what they are, split into the ones you can fix this weekend and the ones only an inspection can settle.
Plate I, the idea
What "conducive" actually means
A subterranean termite colony lives in the ground and sends workers out to look for food. What it needs to reach a house is simple: moisture to keep from drying out, timber it can get its mouth on, and a way in that stays hidden from daylight. Conducive conditions are anything around a building that quietly supplies one of those three.
None of them summon termites on their own. What they do is tip the odds. A dry, well-ventilated, well-kept house with a clear inspection zone at the wall base is a hard target. The same house with mulch piled over the vents, a dripping tap and firewood stacked against the weatherboards is an easy one. Same street, same species, very different invitation.
That is why this guide is worth twenty minutes with a wheelbarrow. You cannot move your house off the coast or out of the old timber belt, but you can take away most of what makes it easy. The rest, the parts you cannot see or safely judge, is what a licensed inspection is for.
Plate II, the house
The conditions, mapped onto a house
The same six turn up again and again in Hunter homes. The solid spots are yours to fix. The open ones are hidden or need judgement, so they belong to an inspection.
You can fix it
Needs a licensed inspection
Plate III, the weekend list
What you can fix yourself this weekend
None of this needs a licence, and all of it makes the next inspection quicker and cheaper. The theme is the same throughout: keep the base of the wall dry, clear and timber-free, so anything approaching has to do it in the open.
- Mulch and garden beds piled at the wall
- Mulch holds moisture and hides the very strip a termite would cross to reach the timber. Mulch itself is fine; mulch mounded up over the subfloor vents and hard against the brick is not. Pull it back and keep a clear zone a hand's width wide at the wall base so the vents breathe and the brick can be seen.
- Leaking taps, overflow and downpipes
- A dripping garden tap, a hot-water overflow, an air-conditioner draining at the wall or a blocked downpipe all keep one patch of ground permanently damp. Damp ground next to timber is the single strongest invitation there is. Fix the drip, and send condensate and stormwater away from the house, not down the wall.
- Firewood, offcuts and timber against the house
- A woodpile leaning on the weatherboards is a food store with a bridge attached, and it hides the wall behind it. The same goes for stacked offcuts, old fence palings and forgotten deck boards. Get it up off the soil and clear of the wall, racked away from the house.
- Blocked or painted-over subfloor vents
- Those little grilles at the base of the wall dry the subfloor out, and a dry subfloor is a poor target. Renders, extensions, decks and grown-over gardens quietly seal them one by one. Clear every vent you can find and keep them open; a subfloor that breathes is doing half the prevention for you.
- Garden timber touching the wall
- Sleeper edging, raised planter boxes, trellis and pergola posts set straight into the soil and touching the house give termites a covered path from the ground to the cladding. Break the contact where you can, and keep landscape timber and structural timber apart.
Illustrative photos. If clearing any of this turns up mud tubes or hollow-sounding timber, stop and read the next section before you go further.
Plate IV, the inspect list
What is not yours to fix
The rest are either out of sight or a matter of judgement about a barrier and a building. Doing them yourself risks either missing the problem or making it harder to trace. These are what a licensed inspection to AS 4349.3 is for.
- A slab edge buried or bridged
- On a slab-on-ground house the exposed edge of the slab is the inspection strip, the place a mud lead would show. Paths, patios, tiled porches and garden beds poured or piled over that edge hide it and can carry termites straight past the barrier and into the wall, unseen. Judging whether an edge is bridged is a job for someone who knows where the barrier sits.
- The subfloor you cannot get into
- Low, dark, poorly ventilated subfloors are where the moisture story really lives, along with sub-slab plumbing leaks and drainage you would never see from the yard. Getting under safely, reading the piers and the bearers, and telling damp-from-condensation from damp-from-a-leak is inspection work.
- A barrier you cannot confirm is intact
- Many Hunter homes have a physical or chemical termite barrier from when they were built or last treated. Whether it is still continuous, or has been broken by a renovation, a new path or a service trench, is not something you can tell by looking. It is checked, on a schedule, by inspection.
Found mud tubes or hollow timber already?
Leave it just as you found it. Do not spray it, break it open or knock the workings off, because a disturbed colony scatters and gets much harder to find and treat. Cover it back over if you uncovered it, and book a licensed inspection.
Plate V, close to home
Which of these your street tends to have
Housing stock decides the usual conducive conditions as much as anything. The Hunter has four rough environments, and each one tends toward its own version of the same story.
- The salt band
Merewether · Stockton · Bar Beach - Sea air keeps beachside subfloors damp all year, and damp is the deciding factor. On these streets the moisture and the ventilation are the first things worth sorting. More on the coast on the Newcastle page.
- Federation weatherboards
Mayfield · Hamilton · Cooks Hill - Raised timber floors and generous subfloors are easy to inspect, which is the good news, but they collect stored timber underneath and grown-over vents around the edge. The Newcastle page has the inner-ring detail.
- Brick-and-tile postwar
Lake Macquarie - Forty years of garden growth is the classic culprit here: beds that have crept up over weep holes and vents which were clear when the house was new. See Lake Macquarie.
- Floodplain and bush edge
Maitland · Port Stephens - On the floodplain the ground simply stays wet longer after rain; on the sand-and-bush fringe it is decks, landscape timber and garden sleepers set against the house. See Maitland and Port Stephens.
Questions
Asked about prevention
If I fix all of this, do I still need an inspection?
Still yes. A cleared-up house lowers the odds and makes any problem show earlier, but it cannot reveal whether a colony is already working behind a wall or under the floor. Only a licensed inspection settles that. A tidy, clear house is also quicker and cheaper to check, and simpler to keep watch over through the year.
Is mulch really a problem, or is that overblown?
Mulch on a garden bed away from the house is fine. The problem is mulch mounded up against the wall and over the subfloor vents, where it traps moisture and hides the strip you most want to be able to see. Keep a clear, dry inspection zone at the wall base and mulch the rest of the bed however you like.
We rendered over the old weep holes for looks. Does it matter?
It is worth raising with an inspector. Covering the weep holes and vents seals the subfloor's ventilation and hides the inspection zone at the same time, and it is one of the more common conducive conditions we find on tidied-up houses. It does not mean you have termites; it means the house has lost two of its early-warning advantages.
It is a new house on a slab. Am I safe from this?
No house is automatically safe. New slab homes are built with a barrier, but the barrier only works while the slab edge is kept clear and visible. The usual way a new home picks up conducive conditions is a year or two later, when a path, a patio or a garden bed goes in over that edge. Keeping the slab edge exposed is the whole job.
I have a termite barrier. Can I stop worrying about the rest?
A barrier and good habits work together, they do not replace each other. Paving, gardens, stored timber or a leaking pipe can bridge or undermine even a well-installed barrier, which is exactly why barriers are inspected on a schedule rather than fitted and forgotten. The two honest ways to manage termites are covered in the barrier or baiting guide.
I found mud tubes while clearing the garden. What now?
Stop, and leave them undisturbed. Mud tubes, or leads, are how termites travel, and breaking them open or spraying them just scatters the workings and leaves the colony harder to trace. Cover the area back over if you disturbed it, and book a licensed inspection so it can be found and dealt with properly. The flying ants or termites guide helps if what you saw had wings instead.
Keep reading
Related pages
Termite inspection and management
What an inspection to AS 4349.3 covers, and how management to AS 3660 actually works.
See the service →The plain-words glossary
Harbourage, conducive conditions, non-repellent, mud lead: the trade's words in English.
Open the glossary →
References
- Australian Pest Control Association, Termite control options. Background on termite management and the Australian Standards this page describes as method, AS 3660 (management) and AS 4349.3 (inspection), never as a credential we claim.
- Australian Museum, Termites. Reference biology for why moisture and concealment, not the house itself, decide where subterranean termites forage.
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