ABSTRACT
The modern centrally heated house with fitted floor coverings and heavily insulated roof space, and often incorporating pretreated timbers, is no longer the hospitable environment provided by houses over the centuries for wood-boring beetles. This is just as well for surveyors because the same carpets and roof insulation, by concealing so much of the timber within a building, make life very much more difficult for the detection of beetle infestation than it was in the days of loose-laid carpets and uninsulated roofs. It is not common to find infestations in houses built during the last 50 or so years, but with older houses – indeed, any built prior to 1960 – a significant proportion have at least some areas of timber where beetles have been active.
