I used Advance once for carpenter ants. It did seem to work, though not as quickly as I would have liked. I bought it from Do My Own Pest Control online, and they did recommend pairing it with a gel ant bait, maybe the one from Advion. It has been a few years so I don't remember now. Our carpenter ant infestation was in the wood of raised beds and hadn't made it to the house yet, so I had the advantage of being able to be more patient and laid back while waiting for it to work. I am fairly sure it was in 2015 when I used it, when our rainfall for the year was about 200% of average....or maybe in 2016 after we had all that rain in 2015, which seemed to drive ants above ground everywhere. My goal, of course, was to get rid of those carpenter ants before they found the house, and I did succeed at that. I hope you don't have to hire an exterminator.

I'll link domyown's website for you. I doubt there is anything there that you don't already know about, but you never know.....

Do My Own Pest Control website

Good luck getting rid of them.

Dawn

I've looked into Advance. I would like to use it as a one-two punch. Its a protein based bait and the gel I'm using is a sugar based bait. They say ants differ, some might like protein and some like sugar.

I think I've found the nest. Its up in the eave of the house, above the " soffet " . I had read that these ants make noises. Its sort've a rustling sound , or sounds like static on the radio. I was up on a step ladder under the eave and heard that sound, just clear as a bell. I started pounding on the soffet and got'em stirred up, bunches of them came out in sight.

This was last Saturday. So I applied another tube of the gel which is the only bait I can use in the eave. I'm not seeing very many ants, fewer than before , but they're still there. And like you say, I wanna get rid of them ASAP as they're doing damage to the house. I'm gonna hit em with another shot of gel Saturday and then make a decision to call the exterminator.

Well, the war is over. 24 days of brutal combat and the carpenter ants are dead .

The Optigard was thinning them out. But about once a week, there would be some type of swarming activity in the eave of the house where I found their nest. I would not see more than a few ants per day, then boom ...... they would be crawling around the eave, even some larger with wings.

So last week, I called an exterminator. He did a whole house inspection and wanted to upsell me a termite treatment. This was more than I wanted to spend right now and I don't have termites. But he told me the chemical he would use for both termites and carpenter ants, brand name was Taurus SC . The active ingredient is fipronil. Way back at the start, I tried a product called Combat that was not effective, that was also fipronil. But it was only 1% fipronil. Taurus SC is 10% fipronil.

And I found I could buy Taurus SC on Amazon. A 14 oz bottle for $50. I sprayed the eaves and around the foundation Monday and have not seen a carpenter ant since. I'm sure they're gone.

Fipronil acts like a gel bait, it has a delayed action that allows the ants to carry it back to the nest and infect other ants, including queens. Taurus is not a gel, its a spray application, which I was told by our State Agri Dept that regulates pesticides, is far more effective than a gel. The ants don't actually have to eat the fipronil, they just get it on them when they walk through. Unlike most sprays, its not a repellent.

I'm glad you found a solution to the carpenter ant problem.

Yes, the war is over !