The best ways to kill ants fast

Maybe you have ants in your house. Maybe you have just too many ants in your yard. Maybe they’re all over your patio. I’ve been there. There’s an easy way to get rid of all of the above, and more. In this article, we’ll go through the best way to kill ants and rid yourself of this pest.

Ants are helpful in some ways. Like this summer, the presence of ants helped my arborist identify that my oak tree was infested with aphids.

Certainly, you don’t want to kill all ants. But they are pests, particularly when they are in your house. And you want to take into consideration issues like, is the solution kid or dog friendly, if those are concerns.

So let’s go through the most effective ways to kill ants fast in your house and yard.

The best ways to kill ants in your house

Ants in your house are the worst kind of ants. Ants in the kitchen are particularly awful. So gross. Climbing all over your cabinets and countertops. Yuck.

You can buy the traps from the hardware store like Combat Ant Baits and Raid Ant Baits. But I recently had a situation where these did exactly nothing. I spent about $18 on a combination of these.

I don’t know where the ants were coming from, all I know is that these common traps maybe killed a few of them but there was an abundant supply waiting to replace them. I had ants on my counter for days.

The best product

The only thing that killed kitchen ants fast was Terro Liquid Ant Baits. I put 6 of them down in my kitchen, 4 on the counters and two in cabinets. Within 6 hours I no longer saw any ants on the counter (and still haven’t come back).

One of the traps in the cabinet attracted a stream of ants that seemed to be coming from the corner of the floor. They marched in a line to this trap for about a day. And then I never saw any again! A truly remarkable product.

Certainly, if you have small kids or pets you want to place them where they aren’t accessible. They have liquid that can easily spill, so places where they will remain undisturbed are ideal.

The best ways to kill ants in your yard

There are a couple of ways to deal with ants outside your house. If the ants are on the patio or on a non-grass area, an instant way to kill them is with some dish soap in a bowl with some water. Just pour it right over them and they all die. Check out this article I wrote which has a video demonstration.

If the ants are in the grass, your best bet is to get Terro Outdoor Liquid Ant Bait Stakes. You can push them into the ground about 6 feet apart and they will do their job beautifully.

I once had 60 ant hills in my small, 1,000 square foot yard and 6 taro outdoor ant stations caused them to all disappear within a few days.

How to protect dogs

When you place bait stations, you’ll need to monitor your dogs when they use the yard. Particularly, if you have a large, curious dog who can easily get into a flimsy yard trap, you won’t want to leave them unattended until the yard is successfully treated.

Do-it-yourself ant poison

Before I had dogs, I used to mix my own ant poison which worked quite well. This article tells you how to do it. It’s cheap and effective, but relies on piles of this stuff. Once I got dogs, I couldn’t risk using this method.