Baking Soda for Roach Control: Is It Effective?

Cockroaches are inherently unnerving to look at. The sight of such a creepy-crawly twitching its antennas and roaming around my house always sends me running for cover. 

Sounds familiar?

While the eradication of cockroaches is no rocket science, it is always advisable to explore natural alternatives before resorting to outside help or heavy-duty chemicals.

One such effective roach killer is Baking Soda. 

Baking Soda For Roach Control: An Effective Remedy?

All of us adore baking soda for its culinary and disinfecting capabilities. However, most of us are unaware of its hidden quality of being an effective roach killer. 

That’s right! Baking soda does eliminate roaches. However, unlike most mainstream roach killers, it needs to find its way INSIDE the roaches’ guts to be effective. 

Also, baking soda is a challenging powder to use, as it has a distinct odor, which roaches find suspicious and try to avoid. 

But worry not, read on to successfully use your cooking condiment as a pest controller. 

Do Cockroaches Eat Baking Soda?

Roaches are infamous for their voracious appetite. They happily munch on most foods around the house. 

But they don’t consume baking soda because of its bitter taste and unpleasant smell. Regardless, baking soda is fatal to roaches and can be a great deterrent to roach infestations if utilized tactfully. 

Chemically known as sodium bicarbonate, baking soda is a soft, white powder composed of two chemicals: sodium cation and bicarbonate anion. 

In layman’s terms, that’s salt and carbonic acid mixed. 

While it plays a vital role as a pH neutralizer in nature, it can be mixed with other ingredients for cooking, where it expands and gives the food a fluffy, silky texture. 

Now, to make this generally unattractive powder tempting for pests, you need to mask its odor and mix it in foods that lure roaches.

Can Baking Powder Kill Cockroaches?

Now the question is: how does baking powder work? Can it be used as an alternative to baking soda?

Baking powder is just a blend of baking soda and a dehumidified acid. 

However, this acid is not generally potent or fatal like its counterparts and has a mild pH. Nor is it fruity or aromatic enough to compensate for its weak strength. 

Therefore, it is the baking soda doing all the work. 

Now, you need to mix some attractive ingredients with the baking powder to entice the roaches to take the bait. 

Here’s why:

• A large part of your roach colony may stay away from the sugar-soda mix in favor of other foods. 

• However, roaches ALSO love sugar, which means that you need to clean your countertops of other crumbs of food and deny them that option.

• This way, they will ONLY have your soda-laced sugar at their disposal. 

Remember, baking soda as a roach-killer is best used for small roach problems, because roaches sometimes may eat a small amount, which will hurt but won’t kill them.

Why Does Baking Soda Kill Roaches?

Roaches are not affected or poisoned by the baking soda directly, instead, it causes them to explode- effectively crushing their internal organs and cracking their exoskeleton. 

Let’s find out why.

Once consumed, the powder enters its gut and mixes with water to expand. 

This is because sodium bicarbonate reacts with water to form carbonic acid.

Once this happens, the innards of the roach begin to expand. 

Now, all roaches have a thick exoskeleton on their backs. The exoskeleton is a solid structure fixed to the body, which cannot expand or contract in size as there is no surrounding flesh and tissue to provide elasticity. 

As the carbonic acid keeps forming inside the roach, it triggers a rapid exothermic heat reaction, simultaneously creating enormous amounts of gas.

As a result, the roaches are essentially trapped within their rigid exoskeletons, which slowly start cracking, ultimately causing the roaches to explode and die. 

As the baking soda gas expands, it will push up against the roach’s exoskeleton, which is hard and unyielding. This will crush the organs. As the gas continues to heat up and expand, it will crack the roach’s exoskeleton.

Does Baking Soda And Sugar Kill Cockroaches?

But a major problem remains. 

How do you make sure that the roaches ingest the baking soda? The only solution is to make the powder more interesting by adding a pinch of sugar to the mix. 

This sugar not only has an attractive scent but is also similar in appearance to baking soda, giving you the advantage of preparing a homogenous-looking bait. 

Here’s how to make an effective insecticide with sugar and baking soda:

• Add 2 teaspoons of sugar to 2 teaspoons of baking soda

• Mix these ingredients in a bowl to form a uniform powder.

This sugar will allow you to draw in the roaches and mask the poison lurking beneath. 

Final Words

And there you have it. You can now make an easy, cheap, and effective insect killer at home. 

This remedy is extremely effective for small-scale roach infestations and can eliminate these stubborn pests within 10 days. 

However, always choose to hire professional exterminators for large-scale roach attacks and try to maintain hygiene around your house to prevent a relapse.