Not every drywood termite problem needs a tent over the house. Plenty do. The difference comes down to one question: can we reach all of the activity? Here's how that gets decided honestly.
Localized drywood treatment means applying product directly into the infested wood and the galleries inside it, rather than gassing the whole structure. In practice that's XT-2000 borate dust and Termidor® foam injected through small access points — the dust distributes through gallery systems, and the foam expands to fill voids that a liquid would just run out of.
Localized treatment fits when the activity is confined and accessible: a single infested beam, an area of trim or fascia, a window frame, a piece of furniture. If an inspector can identify the extent of the galleries and physically reach them, treating just that area avoids the cost and disruption of tenting for no loss in effectiveness.
Unlike fumigant gas, borate leaves a residual in the treated wood. That means the wood you treated keeps some protection afterward, which fumigation does not provide at all. On accessible bare wood, that's a genuine advantage of the localized approach.
Here's the honest limit. No-tent treatment only reaches what can be reached. If drywood activity is scattered through multiple areas of the structure, sitting inside finished walls, running through framing nobody can open up, or showing up in more than one part of the house at once, localized injection will treat the spots you found and miss the ones you didn't. That's not a product failure — it's a coverage problem, and no amount of additional injection solves it.
"Do we know where all of it is?" If the answer is yes, localized treatment is reasonable. If the answer is "probably, mostly," a whole-structure fumigation is the treatment that doesn't depend on that guess being right. Anyone who tells you no-tent always works, or that tenting is always necessary, is selling rather than inspecting.
Identifying the species comes first, since subterranean and Formosan termites are a different problem entirely and are not treated this way. After that it's a matter of mapping the extent: frass locations, kick-out holes, sounding the wood, and checking the areas homeowners rarely look at. The treatment recommendation should come out of that evidence, not out of a price list.
Ask which areas were inspected, what evidence was found in each, and specifically what the plan is for any area that couldn't be fully inspected. The answer to that last one is usually where the real decision lives.
Not sure which treatment fits your home? Call us at (888) 670-2532.