Table of Contents
The short answer
Cockroaches come back to a kitchen because the things that brought them are still there: water, a film of grease, a warm gap to hide in and a way in. A spray kills the ones it touches and changes none of that. Cockroach control that lasts has four parts, and only the first three are the technician's: an inspection that finds where they live, bait placed in those places, a follow-up for the eggs that were laid before the treatment, and a kitchen that is kept clean, dry and sealed in between.
Which cockroach you have decides how seriously to take it. One large reddish-brown cockroach on the floor at night has usually wandered in from a drain or a shaft. Small light-brown cockroaches in the cupboard hinges are German cockroaches. They are breeding in the kitchen itself, they do not go away without treatment, and shop sprays tend to spread them. They are the ones this guide is mostly about.
IHR Dream Cleaning treats cockroaches in homes and offices, with an inspection before anything is applied; the pest control service page sets out the visit. The starting price is AED 149 for a studio and AED 179 for a one-bedroom flat, with the larger sizes set out further down. We are also a cleaning company, which matters more with this pest than with any other, because the cleaning decides whether the treatment holds.
Which cockroach is in your kitchen
Two kinds are the ones a kitchen in Abu Dhabi usually sees. They look different, live in different places and call for different responses, so identify yours before you spend anything. A clear photo beside a coin is enough.
| What to compare | Small light-brown (German) | Large reddish-brown (American) |
|---|---|---|
| Adult size | A little over a centimetre | Three to four centimetres |
| Marking | Two dark stripes behind the head | Yellowish band behind the head |
| Where it lives | In the kitchen: hinges, motors, under the sink | Drains, shafts, bin rooms, manholes |
| How it arrives | Carried in, or from the flat next door | Walks in through drains and gaps |
| One sighting means | Many more behind the units | Often a single visitor |
| What solves it | Inspection, bait, follow-up, cleaning | Wet drain traps, covers, sealed gaps |
The German cockroach lives in the kitchen
The German cockroach spends its whole life indoors and close to people. It wants warmth, moisture and a crack narrow enough to touch its back and its belly at once. That is why it is found inside cupboard hinges, behind the rubber seal of the fridge door, in the motor housing of appliances and in the gap behind the splashback, and not out on an open shelf. It comes out at night to feed and drink, and it does not go far from where it hides.
Its breeding is what makes it a problem. The female carries her egg case with her until just before the young hatch, so the eggs stay protected inside the hiding place and are rarely seen or reached. One case holds thirty or more young, and in a warm kitchen they are adults themselves within a few months. The young are small, dark and wingless, with a pale stripe down the back, and people often take them for a different insect. Seeing them is the clearest sign that cockroaches are breeding in your kitchen and not visiting it.
The other signs are specks like ground black pepper in cupboard corners and along hinge lines, dark smears near water, empty egg cases a few millimetres long, cast skins, and a stale smell in a cupboard that has been shut. A cockroach seen in daylight means the hiding places are crowded.
The large cockroach is a visitor from the drains
The large cockroach breeds in the drainage system, service shafts, bin rooms and manholes, where it is warm, wet and undisturbed. It enters a home through a floor drain whose water seal has dried out, through the gap around a pipe, or under the front door, and it turns up more often after a home has stood empty over the summer. One at night is not an infestation. One every week means there is an open route, and finding the route matters more than killing the cockroach.
If what you are seeing matches neither description, the guide to household pests in Abu Dhabi has a wider table.
Why they come back
A treatment removes cockroaches. It does not remove the reasons a kitchen suits them, and it does not close the ways in. When they return some weeks after a visit, the cause is usually on this list.
Water
Water comes first. A cockroach can go a long time without food and only a short time without a drink, so the damp places in a kitchen matter more than the crumbs. Look for the slow drip under the sink that has swollen the cabinet base, condensation on the cold-water pipe, the tray under the fridge that catches defrost water, the dishwasher door seal, a wet sponge left in the sink and the splashes around a pet's water bowl. In Abu Dhabi, add the AC: a blocked or badly routed condensate drain can keep a patch of wall or ceiling near the kitchen damp for months.
Dry the sink and the draining board last thing at night and hang the cloth up. Have leaks repaired before the treatment, not after: a weeping joint under a sink is a small plumbing repair.
Grease and crumbs
Cockroaches eat almost anything, and they need very little of it. The supply that keeps a population going is rarely the visible mess. It is the film of cooking grease on the side of the cooker and the wall behind it, the layer inside the hood and on its filters, the oily fluff on top of the wall cabinets, the crumbs under the toaster and in the cutlery drawer, the spill that ran under the fridge and the sticky ring under the oil bottle. A kitchen that cooks with oil every day builds this up faster than a weekly wipe removes it.
Grease also works against the treatment directly, because bait is only eaten when nothing better is on offer. How to take that grease off without damaging cabinet finishes is covered in our guide to degreasing the hood, hob and cabinets.
Drains
Every drain has a bend that holds water, and that water is the only thing between your kitchen and the drainage stack. In a floor drain nobody uses, or in a home closed for the summer, it evaporates, and the pipe is then an open door for the large cockroaches that live below. Pour a jug of water into each floor drain every week, fit covers with fine openings, and fill the traps before you travel.
A drain that runs slowly is a second problem. The layer of grease and food slime inside a slow kitchen waste is food and moisture in one place. Hot water and a brush deal with the opening. The pipe itself needs a drain-clearing visit, especially if more than one drain in the home is slow, which usually points to the main line and not to one sink. Check the cupboard under the sink as well. The hole cut for the waste pipe is often far larger than the pipe, and that gap leads straight into the wall void.
Shared risers and the flat next door
In a tower, kitchens sit one above another. The water pipes and the drain stack usually run in a shared riser behind the units, and every flat's pipes pass through the riser wall. German cockroaches use those openings as corridors, along with the rubbish chute room on each floor and the gap under each front door. This is how a careful household gets cockroaches from a neighbour, and why a kitchen that was cleared can fill again when a flat on the same stack is renovated, emptied or treated on its own, which drives the insects along the pipes.
A treatment in an apartment is scoped to your unit, with attention to the shared walls and the entry points. That protects your kitchen for a period. It lasts far longer if the pipe openings are sealed afterwards and the building management is told, because the riser, the chute room and the common drains are theirs to deal with. Who is responsible for the common parts, and what the municipality's own pest control covers, is the subject of the guide to municipal and private pest control in Abu Dhabi.
Deliveries, cartons and second-hand appliances
German cockroaches are carried in more often than they walk in. Corrugated cardboard is the usual vehicle: the flutes are the right size to hide in, the glue is edible, and a box may have sat in a warehouse or a shop store room before it reached you. Grocery delivery boxes, cartons of bottled water or soft drinks, sacks of rice or onions and egg trays all come from places where food is stored in bulk. Unpack on the worktop, look into the folds, and take the cardboard to the bin room the same day. Never keep a stack of flattened boxes beside the fridge.
Used appliances are the other route. A second-hand fridge, microwave, coffee machine or cooker can carry a colony inside its motor housing or insulation, warm and out of sight. Check one with a torch before it comes through the door, and if you have had a treatment recently, tell the technician about anything that has arrived since.
Hiding places that are never opened
A fitted kitchen is full of voids: the hollow space behind the kickboards under the base units, the gap between the back of a cabinet and the wall, the housing around a built-in oven, the chase where pipes rise behind the sink, loose silicone along the back of the worktop, a cracked tile behind the cooker. None of these is cleaned in the normal course of things, all of them are warm, and a cockroach needs a gap of only a few millimetres. A treatment reaches into them. Closing them afterwards is what stops the next arrivals settling in.
Sprays, and treatments that stop too soon
Two habits bring cockroaches back even when everything else is right. The first is spraying. A household aerosol kills what it hits and leaves a deposit that cockroaches avoid, so the population moves deeper into the units and into neighbouring rooms, and bait placed later on those surfaces is avoided too. German cockroaches are also well known in the trade for becoming resistant to insecticides they meet often, which is one reason a spray that used to work can seem to do nothing now.
The second is stopping after one visit when a second was advised. The egg cases present on the day are protected from most treatments, and the young that hatch from them have to meet the bait as well. If nobody checks and renews it, those young grow up in a kitchen with no competition.
What a proper treatment involves
A proper cockroach treatment looks unimpressive. There is no fog and often no smell. Most of the visit is spent looking, and what is applied is counted in dots. Our own service follows the steps below, and a careful company anywhere works in much the same order.
- You describe the problem when you book: what you have seen, where, how often, and what you have already used.
- The technician inspects the kitchen and the likely entry points to confirm which cockroach it is and how far it has spread, before treating anything.
- Treatment is applied to the places the inspection identified, with products approved for the type of property.
- You are told what was found, what was treated and what to change in the kitchen so that the problem is less likely to return.
- Where a repeat visit is needed, that is explained before the work starts.
The inspection
Expect a torch and a lot of opened doors. The technician looks at the hinges and upper corners of every cupboard, the cabinet under the sink and its pipe openings, behind and under the fridge, the cooker and the dishwasher, the kickboards, the hood, and any small appliance that stays warm: kettle, toaster, coffee machine, microwave, router. Droppings show where cockroaches rest, and how thick they are shows where the main groups are. Some technicians leave small sticky monitors in a few places, to measure numbers and to compare at the follow-up.
You can help by having the cupboards emptied, by saying which neighbours have had the same problem, and by pointing out where you see cockroaches at night. A treatment that begins without this stage is guessing. A standard apartment treatment typically takes 30 to 60 minutes, and a kitchen with a heavy problem sits at the long end of that or beyond.
Gel bait, and why it is the main tool
Across the trade, the main treatment for German cockroaches is gel bait: a food that cockroaches prefer, carrying an insecticide that acts slowly. It is placed as many small dots directly in and beside the hiding places: hinge recesses, the underside of shelves, the corners of the sink cabinet, behind the fridge, inside the kickboard void.
The slowness is deliberate. A cockroach that feeds and dies on the spot kills only itself. One that feeds, returns to the hiding place and dies there passes the insecticide on, because cockroaches eat each other's droppings and their dead. That is how bait reaches the young, and the females carrying egg cases, which rarely come out to feed.
It also explains the rules that come with it. Bait has to stay where it was put, so those spots are not wiped. It has to stay attractive, so nothing strong-smelling is sprayed near it, insecticide least of all. It has to be the most appealing food available, so the grease and crumbs have to go. And because it is eaten and dries out, it is checked and renewed at the follow-up. Many small placements close to the hiding places do more than a few large ones, since a cockroach does not travel far to feed.
Other tools may be added where the inspection calls for them: a surface treatment at entry points and around drains, which matters more for the large cockroach than for the German one, a dust blown into dry voids, or a product that stops the young from maturing. Which of these your kitchen needs is the technician's decision, and you should be told what was used and where.
The follow-up
The first visit deals with the cockroaches that are there. The follow-up deals with the ones that were eggs on that day, and it shows whether the treatment is working. Bait points are checked. Bait that has been eaten is good news and is replaced. Bait that is untouched is in the wrong place, or something nearby is more attractive. Monitors are compared, fresh droppings are looked for in cupboards you have cleaned, and any hiding place that was missed is treated.
How long after the first visit this happens is set by the technician, and it depends on the product and the size of the problem. Ask at the first visit whether a follow-up is planned, and whether its cost is inside the price you were given.
Between the two visits, expect slow, unsteady cockroaches in the open, including by day, then dead ones, then fewer of both. Some activity for a short period is normal, as insects are flushed out of hiding, and it does not mean the treatment has failed. A wave of very small ones later on is the hatch from the old egg cases. If the numbers have not clearly fallen within the time you were told to expect, let us know so that a follow-up can be arranged.
The cleaning that makes the treatment work
Cleaning cannot remove a German cockroach population, and a treatment cannot hold in a kitchen that keeps feeding one. Each needs the other, and the cleaning comes in three stages.
Before the technician comes
The aim is access and an absence of competing food. Finish the evening before at the latest, so that the surfaces are dry.
- Empty the kitchen cupboards and drawers, at least the ones where you have seen cockroaches or droppings. Put the food in sealed containers and stack everything in another room.
- Vacuum the droppings, egg cases and dead insects out of the empty cupboards with the nozzle, then empty the vacuum into a bag, tie it and take it out. Cockroaches are drawn to places that smell of other cockroaches.
- Wipe the shelves with warm water and washing-up liquid, and let them dry with the doors open.
- Degrease the hob, the wall behind it, the sides of the cooker, the hood and its filters, and the tops of the wall cabinets.
- Slide the fridge forward if it moves freely and clean the floor and wall behind it. Do not drag out a gas cooker or strain its hose, and do not move a plumbed-in appliance. Clean what you can reach and tell the technician.
- Clear the cupboard under the sink completely.
- Take out every cardboard box, paper bag and pile of old newspaper.
- Do not spray anything, and tell the technician if you have sprayed recently and where.
If you would rather have it done
A focused kitchen clean covers most of that list. The cleaner works from the top down: the hood exterior and removable filters, upper cabinet fronts and tops, the hob and the wall behind it, the sink and tap, counters and appliance fronts, then the floor edges and under the kickboards where they can be reached. The inside of the cupboards is done on request and adds time, so ask for it when you book. Most apartment kitchens take one cleaner two to three hours, and a villa kitchen three to four. Three hours with our materials is AED 105, or AED 90 with yours.
Book it for the day before the treatment, or for the morning of an afternoon visit. Booked for the day after, it would wash off part of what the technician applied.
After the treatment
For the period the technician gives, clean around the treatment and not through it. Wash the worktops, the hob and the table as usual, collect dead cockroaches daily, and leave the bait points, the skirting line and the floor behind the appliances alone. What to wipe, when to mop and how to clean the cupboards without removing the bait is set out step by step in the guide to cleaning after pest control.
The routine that keeps them from returning
Cockroaches feed at night, so the state of the kitchen when the lights go off is what counts. A kitchen that is closed down dry and bare every evening gives a newly arrived cockroach nothing to stay for.
| When | What to do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Every night | Wash up, wipe hob and worktops, dry the sink, lift pet food bowls, close or empty the bin | No food or water overnight |
| Every week | Empty the toaster tray, wipe under small appliances, wash the bin, top up floor drains | Removes the small steady supply |
| Every month | Wash the hood filters, wipe cabinet tops, check under the sink for damp | Stops grease and leaks building up |
| Twice a year | Clean behind the fridge and cooker, check silicone and pipe seals | Clears the places nobody sees |
Closing the routes in
Once the numbers are down, an afternoon of small repairs does more than another treatment would. Ask the technician when to do it, since the bait behind a gap has to finish its work before the gap is closed.
- Pipe openings under the kitchen and bathroom sinks: fill the gap around each pipe with silicone or filler, and fit a cover plate where the hole is large.
- The back edge of the worktop and the joint between splashback and wall: replace silicone that has shrunk, split or gone black. This is grout and silicone work if you would rather not do it yourself.
- Kickboards: refit loose ones so that they meet the floor, and seal where they meet the wall.
- The front door and any door to a balcony or service corridor: a brush or rubber strip along the bottom if light shows underneath.
- Cracked or missing tiles and open holes behind the cooker and fridge: filled.
What changes between a tower flat and a villa
In a tower flat the pressure comes from the riser and the neighbours, so sealing the pipe openings and involving the building management matter most. Ground-floor units and buildings close to food outlets or with shared waste areas see more cockroaches, and many homes in that position book a preventive treatment every three to six months, at the shorter end of that range.
In a villa the pressure comes from outside: manholes and gullies in the yard, the grease that collects in an outdoor or second kitchen used for heavy cooking, the bin store, and the gap under the kitchen's back door. Treatment usually takes in the accessible outdoor areas as well as the kitchen. Tell us when you book if there is a second kitchen, so that it is included.
When to call, and what it costs
Call when you see small light-brown cockroaches at all, any cockroach in daylight, the young, droppings or egg cases in the cupboards, or a large cockroach every week despite covered drains. Do not wait for it to get worse to justify the visit. The work, and the number of visits, grows with the size of the population.
A treatment starts at AED 149 for a studio, AED 179 for one bedroom, AED 199 for two bedrooms and AED 229 for three, and from AED 299 for a villa: one treatment, one technician. The pest, how widespread it is and whether a follow-up is likely all affect the figure, which is confirmed before the visit and includes VAT. Where the kitchen has to be seen before it can be priced, the inspection is free. The guide to pest control prices in Abu Dhabi explains what moves the price.
With the cleaning added, a studio treatment and a two-hour kitchen clean with our materials together start at AED 224. Payment is online by card: the clean once we confirm it, the treatment from My bookings on this website once its price is confirmed.
If there is a baby, a pregnant woman, someone with asthma, a cat, a bird or a fish tank in the home, say so when you book. The planning is in the guide to pest control with children and pets at home.
Common questions
How long until they are gone?
Bait is slow by design, so expect a decline and not an overnight result. The technician gives a timeframe for your kitchen based on the size of the population and the product used, and a light problem caught early clears much faster than one that has filled the units.
Does having cockroaches mean my kitchen is dirty?
No. A German cockroach can arrive in a grocery box, or through the riser wall, into a spotless kitchen. What cleanliness decides is what happens next: whether the first few find water, food and an undisturbed gap and become hundreds, or find nothing and fail to settle.
Do they come up through the kitchen sink?
Rarely through the sink itself, because the bend under it holds water for as long as the sink is in use. The usual routes are the gap around the waste pipe where it enters the wall, a floor drain whose trap has dried, and the waste of a sink or basin that has not been used for weeks. Cockroaches found in the sink in the morning most likely came for water during the night.
They are inside the microwave, the coffee machine or the fridge motor. What can be done?
Tell the technician which appliances. Warm motor housings and control panels are favourite hiding places, and bait is placed around and beneath them, not inside anything that touches food or carries mains wiring. Do not open an appliance's casing yourself, and do not spray into it: aerosol propellant is flammable. A small appliance can be unplugged, shaken out over a bin outdoors, wiped, and kept in a sealed bag between uses until the follow-up. One that is badly infested inside may need replacing.
How do I check that they are really gone?
Go into the kitchen with a torch a couple of hours after the lights have been off, open the sink cupboard and the cupboard nearest the cooker, and look at the hinges and the top corners. Wipe a cupboard corner clean and see whether specks reappear over the following week. Sticky monitors under the sink and beside the fridge do the same job while you sleep, so ask the technician to leave a few.
We are moving into a flat that had cockroaches. What should we do first?
Have the empty kitchen cleaned and then treated before anything of yours goes into the cupboards. Empty units are the easiest to inspect, clean and bait, and a precautionary inspection before moving in is a common request. Then unpack out of the cartons on the day and get the cardboard out of the flat.
How to book an inspection and treatment
Book on the website or in the IHR Dream app. Choose pest control and the size of your home, say that it is cockroaches, and describe them: small or large, which cupboards, day or night, for how long, and what you have sprayed. Reply to the confirmation email with a photo beside a coin, which settles which kind it is before anyone travels.
If you want the kitchen cleaned first, book a kitchen clean for the day before and tell us the two belong together. You can cancel or move either visit free of charge up to 6 hours before the start time. We are open every day, 8 AM – 8 PM.
What the visit includes and how to prepare is on the pest control service page, and the places we cover are listed under areas we serve. When you are ready, book a visit. Empty the cupboards the evening before, put the food in sealed containers, and put the spray can away.
