Terms, in plain language

Our guarantee

The 30-day service guarantee

Pests included in the original treatment. If activity continues within 30 days of service we return, inspect and re-treat the affected area at no additional charge.

What it does not cover. A new or different pest problem, conditions outside the scope of the original service, and specialty work — termites, bed bugs, rodents, wildlife, fleas and ticks — which carry their own terms.

If you are on a recurring plan. Customers on a recurring plan also receive complimentary re-services between scheduled visits for covered pests. If something comes up between services, we would rather you call than wait until your next appointment.

Termite work — 12-month re-treatment warranty

Re-treatment of the affected area if active termites are found in a covered area during the warranty period.

What it does not cover. Existing termite damage, repairs to the structure, and damage caused by future termite activity. Coverage is subject to the conditions of the original termite treatment agreement and to the property remaining reasonably unchanged from the time of treatment.

After the first year, termite protection can be renewed annually, which includes an inspection and continued re-treatment coverage.

Why it is written this way

A guarantee you cannot be held to is not worth having. "100% satisfaction" sounds better and means less — there is no number in it, no scope, and nothing a customer can point at. A thirty-day window with a stated list of what is in and what is out is something you can actually hold us to, and it means we both know where it ends before the work starts.

How to read any pest control guarantee

This section is not about us. It is about how to evaluate the guarantee you are being offered by anybody, including us, because the wording in this industry is engineered to sound reassuring while committing to very little, and almost nobody reads it until they need it — which is the worst possible moment to discover what it says.

Find the number. A guarantee without a duration is not a guarantee, it is a mood. "Satisfaction guaranteed," "we stand behind our work," "your happiness is our priority" — none of these contain a period of time, a covered scope or a remedy. If you cannot answer the question "for how long, against what, and what do they actually do about it," there is nothing there.

Find the covered pest list. Almost every service guarantee in the trade is scoped to the pests named in the original agreement. That is reasonable — a company that treated for ants cannot be held responsible for a rodent that arrived in October. But it means the covered list is the guarantee. If the paperwork says "general pest" without enumerating anything, the enumeration will happen later, in a phone call, in their favour.

Find the remedy. There are three common ones and they are very different. Return and re-treat at no charge is the strongest and the most usual. A refund of the service fee sounds generous and is usually worse, because it ends the relationship and leaves you with the pest. "We will work with you" is not a remedy at all.

Find the conditions on you. Most guarantees are conditional on the customer maintaining reasonable conditions — not creating a new food source, not blocking access, allowing the recommended follow-ups, and not having somebody else apply product over the treatment. These conditions are legitimate. What matters is whether they were explained to you before the work or produced afterwards as a reason to decline.

Find whether it survives cancellation. This is where recurring-plan guarantees catch people. Many are written so that coverage exists only while the plan is active. Cancel in month four and the guarantee on the treatment you already paid for in month three disappears with it. Ours does not work that way — the thirty days attach to the treatment, not to a subscription — but you should be checking this on every quote you receive.

Why termite warranties are the ones to read carefully

Termite work is where the gap between what people believe they bought and what they actually bought is widest, and it is worth understanding the distinction before you sign anything, from anybody.

There are two fundamentally different products in the termite market. A re-treatment warranty means that if termite activity is found again within the covered period, the company returns and treats again at no charge. A damage warranty — sometimes called a repair bond — means the company will pay to repair structural damage caused by termites during the covered period, up to a stated limit. The second is dramatically more expensive to carry, is normally sold by companies with the balance sheet to underwrite it, and comes with substantial conditions, annual inspection requirements and exclusions of its own.

What we offer is the first one. A twelve-month re-treatment warranty on the treatment performed, renewable annually with inspection. We do not offer a damage warranty and we are not going to imply that we do by using words like "protection" without saying what is being protected. If a damage warranty is what you need — and for some transactions and some structures it genuinely is — a larger company is the right call, and we will tell you that.

The other thing worth knowing: a re-treatment warranty is only as good as the inspection that preceded it. Coverage is normally scoped to the areas treated and to the structure as it existed at the time. Add a room, build a deck against the foundation, change the grade or let a downspout start discharging against the wall, and you have changed the structure the warranty was written against. That is not a loophole, it is physics, but it is a reason to mention alterations to whoever holds your warranty rather than assume it follows the building automatically.

What to do if a treatment does not work

Call. That is the entire process, and it is worth stating because a surprising number of people do not, either because they assume the callback will be a fight or because they have talked themselves into believing it was their fault.

What happens then: we ask what you are seeing and where, and whether it is the same pest and the same location as the original complaint. That question is not a screening device, it is genuinely diagnostic — the same ants in the same window frame three weeks later means something different from different ants on the other side of the house, and the two get handled differently.

Then we come back out and inspect before re-treating, for the same reason we inspect before treating the first time. A re-treatment applied without understanding why the first one did not hold is just a second chance to be wrong. Often the finding is a conducive condition nobody spotted — a gap that opened, a source that arrived, an adjacent property doing something — and that is a conversation rather than a chemical.

And if what you have is outside the covered scope, you will be told that plainly and told what it would cost as a separate job, on the call, not after another visit. There is no version of this where you discover the exclusion at the end.

What you receive after a service

Documentation is not an afterthought in this trade, it is a legal obligation, and knowing what you are entitled to receive is the easiest way to tell a compliant operator from a casual one.

Texas requires a structural pest control business to give the customer specific information in writing in connection with the service. That includes identifying the licensed business and its licence number, the pesticides used with their EPA registration numbers, and safety information including a contact for questions about the application. If you are handed nothing after a treatment, that is not a company being informal. That is a company skipping a requirement, and the same corner-cutting instinct tends not to stop at the paperwork.

There is a separate requirement aimed at buildings other people share. Under 4 TAC §7.146 a licensee must provide a pest control sign at least forty-eight hours before a planned indoor treatment at residential rental property with five or more units, at a workplace, and at hospitals, nursing homes, hotels, motels, warehouses, food-processing premises, schools and day care centres. The owner or manager then posts it in an area of common access, also at least forty-eight hours ahead. The point is advance warning rather than a record after the fact, so that anyone using the space — a tenant, an employee, a cleaner, a parent — can find out what is going to be applied before it is. It does not apply to a single-family home you own and live in.

Termite work carries its own disclosure obligations beyond the general ones, including documentation of the treatment performed and, where a pre-construction treatment is involved, a specific set of records tied to the structure. If you are buying, selling or building, these documents follow the property and are worth keeping somewhere you will find them in five years.

Keep everything. Not because we expect a dispute, but because a warranty claim two years from now is enormously easier when the original treatment record exists. Photograph it with your phone if paper goes missing in your house, which in most houses it does.

Conducive conditions — the part that is on you

Every guarantee in this trade is written with an assumption that the property does not change in ways that undo the treatment. That assumption is fair, but it is also vague, so here is what it actually means on a West Texas property, in concrete terms.

Water against the structure. This is the single biggest one. An irrigation head that throws against the foundation, a downspout discharging at the wall, a swamp cooler line that drips, an air conditioning condensate line that has been running into the same spot for two summers. In a region this dry, any reliable moisture source is a magnet, and it will support a population that no perimeter treatment can outrun. Fixing it costs less than treating around it forever.

Wood in contact with soil. Fence posts against siding, a deck built down to the dirt, landscape timbers stacked at the foundation, firewood along the wall of the house. Every one of these is a bridge over whatever barrier was established, and for termite work in particular it is the most common way a treated structure becomes an untreated structure without anybody touching the chemical.

Mulch and heavy beds at the wall. Landscaping right up to the foundation holds moisture, hides the inspection line and gives insects a staging area a few inches from the entry points. A hand's width of clear ground between the bed and the wall changes the picture substantially and costs nothing but an afternoon.

Storage against the exterior. Stacked pallets, tyres, sheet metal, an old cooler, a woodpile. Scorpions in particular live under exactly this kind of thing, and treating the house while the harbourage sits ten feet away is a treatment aimed at the symptom.

New openings. A door sweep that wore out, a screen that tore, a utility penetration cut for a new line and never sealed, a garage door that no longer seats. These arrive quietly and they are the reason a house that was clear for a year suddenly is not.

Somebody else's product over ours. A store-bought repellent sprayed on a treated band can push activity away from the treatment rather than into it, which is the opposite of the intent, and it makes the result impossible to read. If you have done it, say so — it is not a problem, it is information.

None of these are listed here so that they can be used against you later. They are listed because they will be pointed out during the inspection, on the day, while there is still time to do something about them, and because a customer who understands why the recommendation was made is far more likely to get the outcome they paid for.

If you are not satisfied and we do not fix it

Most pest control companies would rather you did not know this section exists. Publishing it is a deliberate choice, because a guarantee that only works when the company feels like honouring it is not really a guarantee.

Structural pest control in Texas is regulated by the Texas Department of Agriculture, and the Department accepts and investigates consumer complaints about licensed businesses — the compliance reference sets out the process and what to keep. That covers misapplication, failure to provide required documentation, unlicensed work, and misrepresentation. It is a real process with real consequences for a licence, and it exists specifically because the customer in this transaction usually cannot evaluate the work directly.

If you ever need it, what makes a complaint effective is the paperwork: the service record, the products used, the dates, the sign if one was posted, and what you were told versus what was written. Which is another reason to keep the documents described above.

We would obviously rather resolve something on the phone than have it become a filing, and in practice almost everything is a scheduling problem or a scope misunderstanding rather than a genuine dispute. But the recourse exists whether or not a company mentions it, and a company that tells you about it up front is a company that has decided not to rely on you not knowing.

Recurring service, and how the guarantee sits inside it

Recurring plans run bi-monthly or quarterly. There is no contract, no term, no cancellation fee and no auto-renewing annual agreement — you can stop at any point, and stopping does not retroactively void the coverage on treatments you already paid for.

Between scheduled visits, if something comes up, you call and we come. That is the practical value of a recurring plan and it is more useful than the visits themselves: you are not re-negotiating a price and a slot every time an ant trail appears in July. The interim visit is included rather than being a favour, and you do not need to argue that the problem is bad enough to warrant one.

Bi-monthly suits properties with sustained pressure — acreage, older structures, anything adjacent to open field or heavy landscaping. Quarterly suits most in-town houses. Which one you are recommended depends on what the inspection found, not on which one is worth more, and if a quarterly plan is the honest answer for your property that is what you will be told.

Things this page deliberately does not say

We do not say "guaranteed results." Pest control is a management discipline operating on living populations in an open environment, and no honest operator can guarantee an outcome they do not control. What can be guaranteed is the response: that if the covered pest is still active inside the covered window, somebody comes back and deals with it without an invoice.

We do not say "lifetime." Nothing in this trade is lifetime, and the companies that use the word are relying on you not reading the renewal and inspection conditions attached to it.

We do not say "bonded." That word describes a specific financial instrument and we do not carry one. We carry general liability insurance, which is a different thing, and it is described on the about page rather than blurred into this one.

And we do not put a satisfaction badge in the corner of the page. A badge is a graphic. The paragraphs above are the guarantee, and they are written in language you can hold us to — which was the whole point of rewriting them.

One more thing about thirty days

Thirty days is chosen deliberately, and it is worth explaining rather than presenting as an arbitrary number. It is roughly the window in which a correctly performed general pest treatment should have visibly done its work on an existing population, allowing for the fact that treatments are not instantaneous and that seeing a few insects in week one is normal rather than a failure.

Longer windows exist in the market and they sound better, but on general pest work they are usually attached to a recurring agreement, which means the window is really just the interval between visits you are already paying for. A standalone thirty days on a one-time treatment, with no plan required, is a narrower promise and a more honest one, because it is the period over which the result is genuinely attributable to the work rather than to the passage of time.

The short version

If you take nothing else from this page: thirty days on general pest work, covering the pests and the areas named in your service, remedied by coming back out and re-treating at no charge. Twelve months on termite work, covering re-treatment only, not damage or repair, renewable annually with an inspection. No contract is required for either, and neither one evaporates if you decide to stop recurring service.

The reason this page runs long is that the short version is the part everybody quotes and the conditions are the part everybody discovers later. Putting both in the same place, in the same size type, is the only version of a guarantee that is worth publishing. If anything above is unclear, ask before the work rather than after — that is a two-minute phone call and it is the cheapest thing on this site.

Trusted Termite and Pest Solutions LLC · Licensed and regulated by the Texas Department of Agriculture · Structural Pest Control Licence TPCL 0976265.

Talk to Valentin

He answers his own phone. Tell him what you are seeing, where you are seeing it and how long it has been going on, and he will tell you what he thinks it is and what it costs before anyone books anything.