Woodworm treatment in Glasgow

The national woodworm page covers the beetles, the holes and what treatment involves. What is worth saying about Glasgow specifically is that the timber here gets covered, uncovered and covered again more often than almost anywhere, because so much of the housing stock is rented and turns over fast. That is how a floor with a quiet beetle problem goes twenty years without anybody looking at it, and then gets discovered by a letting agent on a wet Tuesday in July.

Before anything else: the important question is not whether there are holes. It is whether anything is still living in the wood. Most of what we are shown in the West is old and finished, andtelling active woodworm from historic damage is something you can partly do yourself with a torch tonight.

Tenement floor voids

Original tenement floors are softwood, which is exactly what the common furniture beetle prefers, and they sit over a void that is often a little damper than the room above. Slightly damp softwood in the dark, undisturbed for decades, is close to ideal.

What makes the floor void the classic Glasgow find is that nobody sees the face of the timber that matters. The tops of the boards are polished, carpeted or laminated. The undersides, and the joists, are the part with the exit holes on them, and the only way to look is to lift something. So a floor can be quietly infested for years while the room above looks immaculate, and the discovery is triggered by something unrelated: a plumber running a pipe, a new kitchen, or a tenant reporting a soft patch.

There is a connection between this and thedamp under-floor voids that cause most of the wet rot in the West. Beetle activity and elevated moisture tend to turn up in the same places, which is why a competent survey looks for both at once rather than answering only the question you asked.

Lofts and roof spaces

The other half of it is above your head. Tenement roof spaces contain the roof timbers and the sarking boards the slates are nailed to, all softwood, all unheated, and all sitting immediately under a roof that has probably had a slipped slate at some point.

Roof spaces get inspected almost never, because in a tenement the hatch is usually in a common landing ceiling and the space belongs to everyone. In houses across Bearsden, Bishopbriggs, Newton Mearns and the Lanarkshire towns it is a different failure: the loft is full. Twenty years of boxes over boarded-out storage means the joists are simply not visible, and a torch over the top of the insulation is not an inspection.

What we look for up there is fresh, clean-edged holes, pale frass sitting on the top face of a joist or on the insulation below it, and any timber near an old leak, since the two go together.

Rental and HMO stock, which is a Glasgow speciality

The West End and the Southside hold a very large private rented sector, plus a substantial number of licensed houses in multiple occupation around the universities. Hillhead, Partick, Woodlands, Dennistoun, Shawlands, Govanhill and Strathbungo see tenancies turn over annually, sometimes more often.

That has three practical effects on timber.

• Floors get covered and uncovered repeatedly. Carpet out, laminate in, laminate out, boards sanded, vinyl over the lot. Every change is a chance to see the timber, and most of those chances are taken by someone whose job is to get the flat let by Friday.
• Problems are found by whoever is there at changeover.Letting agents and cleaners find more woodworm in this city than surveyors do, because they are the ones lifting a carpet in an empty flat.
• Nobody has continuity. With a new tenant every year and sometimes a new agent, the flat has no memory. The fact that the same soft patch was reported in 2019 exists nowhere.

For landlords, the useful discipline is to have the timber looked at once, properly, and hold the written report. It settles the recurring argument about whether the holes are new, and it is a far better answer to a tenant, an agent or a licensing question than a treatment invoice with no findings attached to it.

Which beetle, and does it matter here

In Glasgow, nearly all of it is the common furniture beetle,Anobium punctatum, leaving round exit holes roughly 1 to 2mm across in softwood. Deathwatch beetle,Xestobium rufovillosum, needs old hardwood, usually oak, and usually already partly decayed. Tenement floor and roof timber is softwood, so deathwatch is uncommon in the West's ordinary housing stock, though it is not impossible in an older hardwood-framed building or a church.

The identification matters because it changes what you are dealing with, and because the presence of an active infestation in structural timber almost always means the timber is damper than it should be. Fixing that is the part that stops it coming back.

What treatment involves in an occupied or let flat

1. Confirm activity first. No live infestation, no treatment. A survey settles it and covers rot at the same visit.
2. Find and fix the moisture. A blocked airbrick or a leaking rone is doing more to sustain the beetle than any product will do to stop it.
3. Get access to the right faces. Boards lifted where the joists need reaching, loft cleared enough to work in, and enough of the floor exposed to treat what is actually affected.
4. Treat, then check the structure. Where larvae have been working in a joist for years, the answer may be replacing or strengthening the joist rather than only treating it.
5. Keep the report. For a rented flat this is the document that saves you having the same conversation next year.

What it costs depends far more on access and extent than on the beetle. Thewoodworm cost page sets out the ranges and what pushes a job to each end of them.