Termites in Thailand

This year after entering my small condo in Pattaya, 11th floor, near Central Road, I had a bad surprise. Opening the door, I noticed some holes in the door frame to the bath room, and when walking into my room I was breaking through the floor - every step was creating a new hole in the floor.

I found out that the floor of my room was the home of millions of termites, eating everything, what is related to wood.

The furniture was not yet invaded, as the floor surface had some plastic surface, but door-frames and everything under this plastic surface is destroyed, beyond any possibility of repair.

The entire floor is now removed, and will be soon replaced with tiles. The wooden frame to the bathroom will be removed too, and frame and door will be replaced with PVC-related materials.

Luckily, repair and materials are not so expensive in Thailand. The damage is about baht 50.000,-.

We did not noticed anything, as we have another condo in Jomtien and are using the small room in Pattaya Central only occasionally.

The floor, somewhat a mixture of pressed wood downside and plastics upside as surface was already there, when I bought the room.

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I can only advice you if you have anything to do with a 'new floor' in Thailand, use tiles - never wood.
Of course there is wood, like teak, which will resist termites, but such hard wood is very expensive- I found out, that floors made of tiles are up to 10 times cheaper than floors made of pure hard wood.

11th floor, concrete building, and these termites made it up into my room. I still wonder, how they could do that?

What else do termites destroy? It seems they only attack wood or wood-related materials, like paper, carton...

Has anybody a similar experience with termites?

Yeah, the remains of the wood paneling from one of the unoccupied houses here are still laying around. It was gutted a year ago because most of wood was infested and destroyed by termites. The builders put some chemicals down but I don't know what they were. All that was left behind the paneling were the labyrinths the termites created. If there are any still laying around, I'll take some pictures tomorrow and post them.

Mandrunk, on 22 December 2009 - 09:55 PM, said:

I think the best is to burn such broken down wooden fragments quickly.

Poison will kill them, but some termites will always survive within the wood especially under the floor and the same story is starting again within 14 days, it is impossible to see from outside, how bad the damage is already done inside the floor or furniture. All what can be done is to replace the entire structure. In my case floor and door frames, but if it is a wooden building...it might be beyond repair.

I think, it makes really sense in Thailand to replace wood by concrete like tiles or plastic-doors etc.

Natural housing made of wood is now more expensive than a house made of bricks, tiles etc.

Better use wood only for furniture, but not for floors, walls, ceilings, door-frames...etc.

I've been giving this quite a bit of thought recently, now that we're planning our new house... but I really want hardwood Parquet flooring upstairs.

Not all kind of wood is attacked by termites.

It would be good in your case to ask for more information which wood (like teak) is not attacked by termites.

Also ask for an estimate, comparing tiles and hardwood.

I was surprised, when I saw the difference some days ago.
While nice tiles were about baht 200,- per sqm or even less, (termite-safe) cheapest hardwood for floors was starting around baht 1200,- and better ones around baht 1800,- and more.

My decision was an easy one - tiles.

IIRC, hard woods naturally treated and dried should be fine. There are quite a few species of wood that have natural insect repellent. I can't remember them off the top of my head.

I know I am wrong, but I kept picturing houses on stilts in south east Asia. Is that more popular in Indonesia?

I'm pretty sure that if you raise the house off the ground with artificial or treated pine supports you shouldn't have a problem. It is important to keep an eye on wood laying around the yard too. If it's too close to the house termites can spread from there. Better to destroy the wood than your house.

Mandrunk, on 22 December 2009 - 10:41 PM, said:

I have parquet flooring in my condo. It's probably 20 years old and no problem, perhaps because the parquet is laid on concrete. The gf has a 13th floor condo and her ceiling is infested with them whereas her wooden planked floors are not.

There were termites in the house we bought, or rather the builders discovered a nest in the service shaft which they dug out and doused with insecticide. However, about two months after we'd moved in I noticed a termite gallery on the wall leading to a plug socket. We called in an exterminator, they checked everywhere but the termites hadn't started on any of the furniture or fittings, the house is reinforced concrete and brick so they've nothing to eat there. The exterminators installed a couple of feeding stations and we feed the colony for about five months with a bait called 'Requiem' (American product from Exterra) which contains a cumulative poison; the termites love the stuff but don't realise that it's slowly killing them. As numbers visiting the feeding stations declined and then stopped the baits were removed and they drilled holes through to the foundations and pumped some long term insecticide into the soil beneath the house, we've had no recurrence.

I can recommend the pest control company we used Advance Service very professional and effective (so far). The cost of eradication with a one year maintenance contract and was THB14,000.

Don't even ask! Anybody got a line of reasonable (that means Thai contractor, not farang) vinyl siding to apply over a cement house so we don'y ever need to paint it again???

TIA!

Edited by Mandrunk, 30 December 2009 - 03:13 AM.
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