Bora-Care®
Introduction
A feature that no new home should be without
Help the homes you sell stand out with Bora-Care termite treatment. This “green” solution, an important issue to many homebuyers, protects these structures from termites. Instead of poisoning the soil under a home, Bora-Care eliminates the wood as a source of food. This innovative product was awarded the 2006 Green Builder Magazine® Best of Show award.
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Bora-Care At A Glance
Simply the best at making termite pretreatment simple
Builders are switching to Bora-Care termite pretreamtents at an uprecedented rate.
Cost-effective and easy to incorporate into your logistics, just a few gallons of Bora-Care will protect your entire structure from subterranean termites. During the dried-in phase of construction, your pest control company will apply it directly to the wood, concrete and foundation penetrations in one fast, easy, spray application - and you're done. Termites can't consume the wood and they can't tube over it. Simply put, Bora-Care eliminates more than termites, it eliminates problems. It's a fact that Bora-Care saves builders time and money with their highly efficient process that eliminates problems caused by pumping hundreds of gallons of chemicals into the soil.
Bora-Care At A Glance:
Previously, when builders wanted to protect a house from termites, they would pump 300 gallons of chemicals into the soil below and around the foundation of an average house. These chemicals began showing up in lakes, rivers and aquifers. It is estimated that more than 234,000,000 gallons of pesticides are pumped into residential soil in the U.S. each year on new construction alone (imagine about 40,000 semi-tanker trucks), and most of those homes will need a retreatment in 5-10 years. By making Bora-Care your treatment of choice, you’re preventing this type of scenario from reoccurring, while continuing to provide your customers with an outstanding, highly effective termite protection.
10 Reasons Why Every Builder ShouldSpecify Bora-Care Termite Pretreatments
A Closer Look
What Does Bora-Care Do?
Bora-Care prevents and eliminates:
During last year alone, the use of Bora-Care replaced 45 million gallons of toxic pesticide solution that would have been pumped in the ground. That’s a savings equal to 9,400 18-wheel tanker trucks of pesticide solution. And that’s an amount we can all live with.
How Does Bora-Care Work?
The active ingredient in Bora-Care is a borate salt. Borate salts work by taking advantage of a unique feature in the biology of termites, ants and other insects. If ingested by ants, beetles or termites, the insect becomes unable to extract nutrition from its food and starves to death. And because of this unique mode of action, insects cannot develop a resistance, ever.
Bora-Care works differently than most other insecticides, termiticides and even other borate products on the market today. For starters, it isn’t applied to the soil but to the structure itself. Secondly, it isn’t just a repellent or a bait but a little bit of each. Bora-Care’s unique patented blend of glycols in combination with a borate salt provides results that are hard to beat. As soon as beetles and ants attempt to consume treated wood they die. Subterranean termites won’t even try to eat treated wood and if they attempt to build a tube on treated wood, the termites start to die. This alerts the termite colony and they abandon the wood. (For more on the background of how Bora-Care works, read The Science Behind Bora-Care.)
Works by treating the wood, not the soil.
Bora-Care is applied directly onto wood surfaces, concrete, plumbing penetrations, expansion joints and foundation penetrations. Bora-Care then penetrates the wood, protecting it throughout. Because Bora-Care’s active ingredient is a natural mineral salt, it doesn’t break down over time. Bora-Care remains in the wood for the life of the wood. By keeping the wood sealed or protected from moisture as in the wall voids of a structure, you eliminate the need for retreatment. Soil treatments are not only more difficult to apply, they lose their effectiveness over time - then a costly retreatment becomes necessary every 5 to 10 years. Unlike soil treatments, Bora-Care is not a threat to the plant life or water supply of a home. Bora-Care is made with natural elements that are already present in the environment - not only in the ecosystems outside of your home - but also in many of the products you use inside. Bora-Care can even be used on lakeside homes where soil termiticides may be prohibited.
What Does The Research Say?
More than 300,000 effectively treated homes can’t be wrong. 12 years of efficacy studies to determine Bora-Care’s ability to prevent termites and other wood-eating insects have shown that Bora-Care keeps wood from being a food source. Hundreds of additional studies have confirmed borates’ effectiveness as a preservative, including more than 40 studies confirming its wood-protecting power.
Bora-Care prevents subterranean termites from tubing across treated wood and other treated structural materials. In addition, a study by Louisiana State University demonstrated that even Formosan termites can't tube over concrete treated with Bora-Care.
Pretreatments can be done quickly; Infestations are handled with ease.
Pretreating a home with Bora-Care is fast and efficient. Bora-Care can be applied directly to the wood with a portable backpack sprayer or tank sprayer. The pest control company creates a continuous two-foot tall barrier onto all structural materials in contact with the foundation. There is no need for evacuation of your work crew or for special precautions.
Bora-Care is Up to the Codes
In addition to EPA registration, Bora-Care wood treatments are HUD-allowed and listed for use under the 2006 International Residential Code, Section R320 Protection Against Subterranean Termites. Only Bora-Care’s EPA-registered label allows it to be used on wood as a stand-alone two-foot barrier termite pretreatment. Bora-Care also meets the sill plate end-cut requirements set by building codes and the American Wood-Preservers’ Association (AWPA M4).
A Closer Look at the Benefits of Bora-Care
Saves you one cycle day during construction
The next time you build a home, you’ll save an entire day off your cycle. That’s because with Bora-Care, there’s no need for anyone to leave the job site. With soil pretreatments, workers are required by law to put everything on hold and vacate the premises until the application is complete and dry, negatively affecting construction schedules. But with Bora-Care, there’s no need to coordinate with the pest control company or cement company.
Fastest growing termite pretreatment in the U.S.
The more builders experience the effectiveness of Bora-Care, the more they make it their termite pretreatment product of choice. Join the hundreds of builders who’ve said goodbye to the hazards and problems of soil treatments, and turned to the cost effective, easy to use Bora-Care.
Eliminates weather delay
While soil treatments must be applied to dry ground after footers are dug, Bora-Care does not. Instead, it’s applied indoors, during the dried-in phase of construction. This keeps weather from ever being a factor.
Eliminates need for an additional treatment at final grade
Unlike soil treatments, Bora-Care only needs to be applied once. There is no need to return to the job site after the soil is set at final grade.
Penetrates wood and remains for the life of the wood
A patented mixture of borates, glycol and other ingredients cause Bora-Care to penetrate the wood far deeper than any other borate product available, delivering residual protection. The wood is protected longer, homeowners are happier and builders are growing their businesses faster.
Formulated with a concern for the environment
As the pest management industry becomes more environmentally conscious, Bora-Care continues to be the prime choice for those looking to protect our surroundings. Unlike soil treatments, Bora-Care is not a threat to the plant life or water supply of a home. With its mineral salt, borate-based formula, Bora-Care is made with natural elements that are already present in the ecosystems outside our homes. You’ll also find it in many of the products we use inside.
Not pumped into soil
When you pre-treat wood and concrete with Bora-Care, that’s all you treat. With soil treatments, one of the main concerns is that hundreds of gallons of pesticides are pumped directly into the ground, where they could spread. Bora-Care can even be used on lakeside homes where soil termiticides may be prohibited.
12/25-year warranty available for your pest control company (varies from builder to builder)
If your pest control company chooses, it can register your homes for one of the five levels of our 12/25-Year BoraShield™ warranty (this warranty is extended only to the PMP). Our new BoraShield warranty protects you, your customers and your pest control company. This unprecedented warranty is the best in the pest control industry. And it’s the only one to offer a 12-year damage repair warranty. (One level even offers a 25-year product replacement warranty for mold protection).
The Science Behind Bora-Care
Bora-Care is a low toxicity wood preservative that has a low environmental impact. It protects wood and whole structures from most wood destroying organisms including subterranean termites, Formosan termites, drywood termites, wood destroying beetles, carpenter ants, and decay fungi.
The active ingredient is the natural borate salt and micronutrient disodium octaborate tetrahydrate (DOT). DOT is a natural form of elemental boron, which is essential for the healthy growth of plants and believed important in human calcium metabolism. Because animals and humans simply take what they need from their diet and rapidly excrete any excess via the kidneys, DOT has a low acute toxicity and Bora-Care is about half as toxic as sodium chloride or table salt (in a laboratory setting), but it’s very effective against insects and fungi that do not have the same excretion mechanisms. DOT maximizes the solubility, the rate of dissolution and the boric oxide content to give a borate active ingredient far superior to traditional boric acid or borax. At the levels used in Bora-Care applications, it prevents pest infestation by inhibiting pest metabolism on a cellular basis. The tetrahydroxyborate anion forms a chelate complex with the cis-adjacent hydroxyl groups in the ribose sugar of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD), with the cationic nitrogen of the nicotinamide moiety providing electrostatic stabilization of the chelate. In this configuration, NAD and NADP cannot be used by the dehydrogenase enzymes of glycolysis, the pentose phosphate pathway or the tricarboxylic acid pathway, and so the cellular energy generating mechanisms, including adenosine triphosphate production, are shut down.
This enhanced borate salt is combined with a patented mixture of alkylene and polyalkylene diols for superior penetration and improved efficacy. The resulting borester compounds have superior penetration into dry wood because diffusion can take place at a lower wood moisture content than if the active ingredient was by itself occurring at above 15% moisture content. But more importantly, this results in much higher efficacy against wood destroying organisms, especially against subterranean and drywood termites. As a result, Bora-Care is the only borate material that is EPA-registered as a primary termite pretreatment in new construction and provides by far the best remedial treatment against drywood termites.