How to Get Rid of Cockroaches for Good: Gel or Spray? A Kitchen and Bathroom Guide

You open a kitchen cupboard at night and a small cockroach darts behind the jars. You squash it and think that’s the end of it. Two days later you see two or three more next to the sink. So you buy a spray from the supermarket and go over every cupboard. The cockroaches disappear for a week, then come back in bigger numbers than before.

This happens in a lot of homes in Egypt, and the insecticide usually isn’t too weak. The method just doesn’t suit the cockroach you have. The small cockroach in the kitchen is not the same as the big one climbing out of the floor drain, and each needs a different treatment.

Below we cover how to identify the type, where cockroaches come from, when gel beats spray, and which popular home remedies do anything at all. If you’d rather skip ahead, our cockroach control page explains how we treat them in homes and restaurants.

First: which type of cockroach do you have?

Most people skip this step, and it matters most. Two types turn up in Egyptian homes far more than any others: the small German cockroach, and the big American cockroach that people here call the sewer cockroach. Both are cockroaches, but their habits are very different, and that changes everything about how you treat them.

The German cockroach: the small one in the kitchen

This is the cockroach you find in kitchen cupboards, next to the cooker and behind the fridge. It’s about 1.5 cm long and light brown with a yellowish tint. If you look closely, you’ll see two dark stripes running lengthwise just behind its head. It has wings but almost never flies. It relies on running.

What makes it such a nuisance is how fast it breeds. The female carries her egg case attached to the end of her body and keeps carrying it until it is nearly ready to hatch. Penn State Extension’s fact sheet says a single case can hold up to about 48 eggs. So the female you squash with your slipper may be carrying a whole generation, and sometimes the case drops off into a crack and hatches anyway.

German cockroaches like warmth, moisture and food close by. That’s why you find them in cupboard hinges, under the sink and inside appliances with a warm motor. They rarely live outdoors, so if you see one in your home, it lives there with you. It hasn’t just wandered in from outside.

The American cockroach: the sewer cockroach

This is the big one that makes you jump when you walk into the bathroom at night. It’s about 4 cm long, shiny reddish brown, and the shield behind its head has pale yellowish edges. It lives in sewers, floor drains, inspection chambers and underground spaces, and it gets into flats through drain openings and bathrooms. It is most common on ground floors and in basements.

The American cockroach has wings and can fly short distances, especially in hot weather, but it usually runs when you get close. Seeing one in the bathroom every now and then doesn’t mean you have a colony inside the flat. It usually means there’s an open route between the sewer and your home.

Quick comparison table

Feature	German cockroach	American cockroach (sewer)
Size	Small, about 1.5 cm	Large, about 4 cm
Colour	Light brown, two dark stripes behind the head	Shiny reddish brown
Where you see it	Kitchen cupboards, next to appliances, under the sink	Bathroom, floor drains, basement, stairwell
Does it fly?	Hardly ever	Short distances at times
Where it comes from	Inside the home itself	Sewers and inspection chambers
Main treatment	Gel in cracks plus cleaning	Treating drains and sealing gaps

A small note: young cockroaches sometimes get mixed up with other insects, most often bed bugs. If the insect you’re seeing is in the bedroom rather than the kitchen, and it’s flat with no wings, read how to tell bed bugs from small cockroaches before you buy anything, because the two are treated in completely different ways.

Where do small cockroaches in the kitchen come from?

We hear this a lot, usually with a bit of guilt attached: “I keep my place clean, so why do I have cockroaches?” Cleanliness matters a great deal, but a German cockroach can get into the cleanest home. It doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It gets carried in.

They come in through the front door

The most common route is cardboard boxes. A delivery box, a vegetable crate or a box brought back from a storeroom can have a cockroach or an egg case tucked into its folds. The same goes for grocery bags left on the floor and takeaway bags from restaurants or shops that have an infestation.

The second route is second-hand appliances. A fridge, cooker or microwave from another home can have cockroaches inside the insulation or behind the motor that nobody noticed. Once you plug it in in your kitchen, they have a warm, ready-made home.

They come in from the neighbours

In apartment buildings, kitchens stacked on top of each other are linked by light wells, drain and water pipes, and the gaps around those pipes where they pass through walls. If a neighbour above or below you has an infestation, or sprays heavily, the cockroaches move up or down to the nearest safe place, and that can be your kitchen. That’s why cockroaches sometimes appear out of the blue when you haven’t brought anything new home.

Why do they pick certain spots?

The German cockroach needs warmth, moisture and food nearby. A kitchen has all of them.

• Behind and under the fridge, because the motor gives off heat all day and water dripping from the fridge keeps things damp.
• Inside the microwave, electric oven and washing machine. The gaps inside the appliance are warm and enclosed, and nobody puts their hand in there.
• Under the sink, where a small leak from the trap or the tap is enough to make the perfect spot for them.
• In cupboard hinges and cracks in the countertop. These are tight spaces, and a cockroach likes to feel a surface touching its body above and below.

So spraying floors and walls misses the cockroaches completely. They aren’t walking around the middle of the kitchen. They’re inside cracks and appliances, and they come out at night.

Cockroach gel: how it works and why it beats spray in the kitchen

Cockroach gel is a bait: food that cockroaches like, mixed with an insecticide that works slowly. Here the slowness is a strength, not a flaw.

The whole idea is that it’s slow

A cockroach finds a drop of gel, eats some and goes back to its hiding place as usual. The active ingredient doesn’t kill it straight away, so it gets back to the colony and dies there. Other cockroaches are then affected through its droppings and its body after it dies, so the effect spreads to cockroaches that never touched the gel. That’s how bait reaches places no spray can.

The University of California’s pest note on cockroaches says plainly that baits beat sprays when you use insecticides, and that most baits take a week or more to show a difference. So you’ll need some patience.

Why spraying makes things worse in the kitchen

A spray kills the cockroach it lands on, and that feels good for a second. But the hidden cockroaches sense the chemical and flee from it to places further away: another cupboard, another room, or the neighbours’ flat. Penn State says much the same thing: indoor sprays and fogger bombs are of little use against German cockroaches and can scatter them, making them harder to control.

That explains a line we hear all the time: “I sprayed and the cockroaches got worse.” There aren’t more of them. They’ve spread out, from one cupboard behind the fridge to the whole kitchen.

When will you see results?

Don’t expect a difference the next day. In the first few days after putting down gel, you may notice more cockroaches moving around, and sometimes you’ll find dead or sluggish ones in odd places. That means the bait is being eaten. The real difference shows by the end of the first week and becomes clearer in the second. If nothing has changed after two weeks, go back over it: is there other food available? Is the gel in the right places? Has someone sprayed near it?

The mistake that kills the gel

We see this one constantly: someone puts down gel, then sprays over or next to it, or wipes the cupboard with bleach or a strong-smelling cleaner. Cockroaches find food by smell, and a strong odour or a repellent near the gel can make them avoid it instead of eating it. And if the gel itself gets wiped away or coated in cleaner, it stops attracting cockroaches.

So if you start with gel, stick with it. Clean the cupboards thoroughly before you apply it, then leave those spots alone. Close off every other food source too, because a cockroach that finds breadcrumbs and oil on the counter has no reason to go to the bait.

General rules for where to put gel

We won’t name a product or tell you how much to use, because that depends on the active ingredient and what’s written on the pack. But some rules hold true every time:

• Lots of small dots work better than one big blob in a single place, because a cockroach eats from the dot closest to where it hides.
• Gel belongs inside cracks, not on surfaces: hinges, the inner corners of cupboards, the gaps around the sink pipes, and under the edge of the countertop.
• Keep it away from food, dishes and any surface you prepare food on.
• Keep it out of reach of children and away from cats’ noses. Low cupboards and the floor are the wrong place if you have a baby who crawls.
• Read the instructions on the pack and follow them to the letter, because they were written for the exact product in your hand.

The best cockroach killer? Wrong question

The first thing people ask us on WhatsApp is: “What’s the best cockroach killer?” The honest answer is that no single product is the best in every case. The same product can work very well in one home and fail in the one next door.

What makes the difference:

1. The method: bait, spray or drain treatment? That depends on the type. The gel that works so well on German cockroaches in a cupboard won’t solve the problem of a cockroach climbing out of the floor drain every night.
2. Placement: the most powerful product in the world, put in the middle of a shelf, will just sit there while cockroaches walk past it. The treatment has to reach where the cockroach lives, not where you happen to see it.
3. The source: if there’s a leak under the sink, cardboard boxes piled on top of the cupboards, or a floor drain with no cover, the cockroaches will come back whatever product you use.

About resistance

Cockroaches, German cockroaches in particular, develop resistance to chemicals they’re exposed to often. The University of California’s pest note mentions that cockroaches have become resistant to many of the chemicals in common sprays that used to control them. That means using the same spray month after month can leave you with only the toughest cockroaches, and a colony that the spray no longer touches.

Another thing people miss: the spray you bought may be designed for flying insects like mosquitoes and flies, with cockroaches listed somewhere in a long list on the label. That doesn’t mean it was made to reach a German cockroach colony hidden inside a fridge motor. Read the pack carefully and find out exactly what it’s for.

That’s why, during an inspection, our technician doesn’t just ask “Do you have cockroaches?” He also asks what you’ve tried before and how much you’ve sprayed, because those answers decide which product will work in your home. It’s part of the written plan we put together for cockroach treatment before any work starts.

Sewer and bathroom cockroaches

If the cockroaches you’re seeing are big and reddish, and they show up in the bathroom, next to the kitchen floor drain or on the stairs, the problem is most likely coming from the drainage. Gel in the cupboards won’t solve it alone.

Close the route first

The American cockroach comes up the same way the water goes down. So your first step is to close that route:

• Drain covers: every floor drain in the bathroom, kitchen or balcony needs a sound cover, ideally a tight-fitting one or one with fine mesh. A broken cover, or one with big holes, is as good as no cover at all.
• Dry traps: the U-bend under a sink or floor drain holds water that acts as a barrier against smells and insects. If there’s a bathroom or drain you don’t use, that water dries up and the route opens. Pour water into it from time to time.
• Gaps around pipes: where pipes go through a wall or floor there is usually a gap. Fill it with a suitable filler or silicone.
• Under the door: flats on the ground floor, or with a door opening onto a stairwell that has cockroaches, need a strip or brush seal to close the gap under the door.

If you smell sewage coming from a particular drain, pay attention. It usually means the trap is dry or broken, and a cockroach can come up through the same opening the smell comes out of.

Floor drains and inspection chambers

If cockroaches are coming out of the drain itself, there’s an infestation in the drainage line. Treatment here uses specific products applied in the drains, and in the inspection chambers (manholes) at the entrance or in the garden, if there are any. This isn’t a job for a supermarket spray, because the product has to reach the right spot and hold up in damp conditions.

It’s the whole building, not just your flat

In apartment buildings, sewer cockroaches are usually a shared problem. There’s one drainage line, and the inspection chambers under the building serve everyone. So if you treat only your own flat, things may calm down for a while, then the cockroaches come back from the main line.

The best results come when the owners’ association or the building’s doorman (bawab) agrees to treat the inspection chambers, basement and light wells together with the flats that have complaints. If that’s hard to arrange, at least close off your own routes properly and treat your drains. That will clearly cut down how many reach you.

Popular home remedies: what works and what’s a myth

Search for how to get rid of cockroaches and you’ll find dozens of remedies: vinegar, bay leaves, cucumber peel, peppermint oil, baking soda, white powder mixed with sugar. A couple have some science behind them. Most nobody has tested properly.

Vinegar, bleach and cleaning products

Vinegar is a good cleaner. It removes grease from the counter and from behind the cooker, so cockroaches have less to feed on. But vinegar isn’t an insecticide, and it doesn’t reach the cockroaches inside cracks and appliances, so the colony stays exactly as it was. The same goes for bleach: it cleans, but it isn’t a treatment. And as we said above, don’t wipe either of them over the places where you’ve put gel.

“What do cockroaches hate?”

People search for this a lot. The practical answer is that cockroaches hate a home with no food left out, no water and nowhere to hide. If the counter is clean at night, the sink is dry, food is in closed containers and cardboard boxes aren’t piled up, a cockroach will have a very hard time. That’s also what the integrated pest management fact sheets we used say: cleaning and cutting off food and water are the foundation, and any bait works better alongside them.

The white powder: it works, but it’s dangerous

One white powder shows up in a lot of home recipes, mixed with sugar or flour. It does genuinely affect cockroaches, and the university fact sheets list it among the baits and dusts in use. But the same fact sheets say it should go on as a very thin layer in enclosed voids that nobody can reach, that it only stays effective while it’s dry, and that it must be kept away from children, pets and food.

What happens with the popular recipes is the exact opposite: people roll it into balls and leave them on the floor, or sprinkle large amounts under the sofa and in corners. That’s where the problem starts.

Cucumber peel, baking soda and the rest

There’s no reliable evidence that cucumber peel keeps cockroaches away. Baking soda on its own isn’t a known cockroach killer either. If you tried them and saw no difference, that’s what we’d expect. Don’t lose more time on them. Go to the plan below.

A 14-day plan so cockroaches don’t come back

There’s nothing clever about this plan, and it takes some discipline. It’s built on the same foundation the university fact sheets describe: cut off food, water and hiding places, treat inside the cracks, and keep monitoring.

1. Days 1 and 2: deep clean. Pull the fridge and cooker out and clean the grease behind and under them. Empty the cupboards and wipe them down, and clear any crumbs from the corners. If you have a vacuum cleaner, run it along the cracks and corners, then seal the bag in another bag and throw it out of the house.
2. Day 2: seal up the food. Sugar, rice, pasta, bread and biscuits go into airtight containers, not open bags or bags held shut with a clothes peg. Pet food shouldn’t sit in the bowl overnight.
3. Day 3: rubbish. Use a bin with a tight lid and take it out every night. Don’t leave rubbish bags by the kitchen door or on the balcony.
4. Days 3 and 4: water. Fix any drip under the sink or from the tap. Dry the sink and counter before bed, and don’t leave dishes in the sink until the next day.
5. Days 4 and 5: seal the cracks. Close the gaps around pipes, the cracks between the counter and the wall, and the gaps at the back of the cupboards. Fit sound covers on the floor drains.
6. Day 5: cardboard out. Any boxes on top of the cupboards or under the bed: empty them and throw them away. Don’t store things in cardboard boxes in the kitchen.
7. Day 5 or 6: gel and traps. Once the kitchen is clean and dry, put dots of gel in the cracks following the rules above. Put sticky traps on the floor along the walls, behind the fridge and inside the cupboard under the sink.
8. Days 7 to 14: monitoring. Check the traps every two days and see which one catches the most, because that tells you where the colony is closest. The University of California considers sticky traps the best tool for keeping track of cockroach numbers. If the gel runs out at a spot, top it up in the same place without wiping the area around it with cleaner.

After two weeks, compare the trap counts with the first week. If they’re clearly dropping, carry on. If they’re flat or rising, there’s a source you haven’t reached, or the infestation is bigger than home treatment can handle.

When do you need a pest control company?

One big cockroach in the bathroom, once, doesn’t need a company. Cover the drain and keep an eye on it. But some signs tell you the problem is bigger than a spray and a home plan:

• You see cockroaches in daylight. Cockroaches naturally hide during the day. If they’re out with the lights on, their hiding places are full.
• Lots of young ones in different sizes. This means they’re actively breeding inside your home, not that a stray cockroach wandered in by mistake.
• Droppings that look like ground black pepper in the corner of a cupboard, inside a drawer or on a door hinge.
• Empty brown egg cases in cracks or behind appliances.
• A musty smell in the cupboard or kitchen as the infestation grows.
• You followed a full plan for two weeks and the count in the traps didn’t go down.

There’s a health reason too. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency notes that cockroach droppings and body parts can trigger asthma and allergies in some people. If a child at home has a chest allergy, waiting doesn’t help them.

Restaurants and shops are a different story

A restaurant, a bakery, any place that prepares food: none of them can afford trial and error. One cockroach in front of a customer is enough to hurt the place’s reputation, and inspections also ask for proof that the premises are treated regularly. The right fit here is a periodic contract with scheduled visits and a written report after each one showing what was done and where. You can see the details of these contracts on our pest control for businesses and restaurants page.

How we work

At Formax we start with an inspection before any treatment, followed by a written plan and a fixed price. In the kitchen we use gel in the cracks, in bathrooms and drainage we treat the floor drains, and all the products we use are registered. You get a written 5-year guarantee and a follow-up visit every 3 months. You can also send us a photo of the cockroach on WhatsApp first, and we’ll tell you what type it is for free before you decide anything. Our team answers in Arabic and English. Full service details are on the cockroach treatment page, and if you’d prefer another way to reach us, every contact option is on our contact page.

The bottom line

Getting rid of cockroaches for good isn’t about a stronger insecticide. It’s about knowing which cockroach you have, cutting off its food, water and hiding places, and treating it where it actually lives. The small one in the kitchen needs gel and patience. The big one in the bathroom needs sealed drains and treatment of the drainage.

Start with the plan above and check the traps honestly. If the numbers aren’t going down after two weeks, don’t keep spraying and experimenting. Send a photo, and our technician will tell you exactly where you stand and what you need.