Every year it’s the same story. You come home after a lovely few days of reunion dinners and angpow, unlock the door — and there’s a lipas strolling across the kitchen floor like it paid rent while you were away. Pest problems spike after CNY because the festive season hands cockroaches and ants everything they need at once: a buffet of food residue, a house left closed with dried-out drains, and warm breeding weather. The good news is it’s completely predictable, which means it’s largely preventable. Here’s what’s actually going on, and what to do about it.

Why do pests spike after Chinese New Year?

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Cockroaches and ants aren’t celebrating the new year — they’re just responding to the conditions we create during it. Three drivers stack up at the same time:

• The food. Days of cooking, open house, and snacking leave residue on surfaces, crumbs in corners, and pineapple tarts, kuih kapit, and mandarin oranges sitting out on the table. To a German cockroach that survives on milligrams of residue a day, that’s a feast that never ends.
• The empty house. Most families balik kampung for a few days. Nobody runs the taps, nobody empties the bin, and the aircon is off — so the house stays warm and humid. Perfect nesting weather, with no one around to notice the population climbing.
• The waste. Reunion dinners generate a lot of rubbish, and rubbish collection often pauses over the holiday. An overflowing bin by the back door is an open invitation to cockroaches and the American cockroach (Periplaneta americana) wandering up from the drain.

One lipas after CNY is a scout. Twenty is a sign the party carried on without you.

The dried-out drain trap nobody thinks about

This is the one almost everyone misses, and it’s the single biggest reason a spotless home still gets cockroaches over CNY. Every floor trap and sink in your house has a U-bend that holds a little water. That water seal is the only thing between your kitchen and the shared drain running under the whole building or terrace row.

Leave the house closed for four or five days in Malaysian heat and that water simply evaporates. The seal breaks, and the drain becomes an open highway — cockroaches walk straight up from the sewer line into your kitchen while you’re two states away eating your auntie’s rendang. You come back to a problem that had nothing to do with your housekeeping and everything to do with an empty pipe.

Why does the boom show up weeks later?

Here’s the part that confuses people: the worst of it often hits after you’ve cleaned up and settled back in. That’s biology. Insecticide and a good mop kill the adults you can see, but a German cockroach egg case carries up to 40 nymphs and hatches a week or two after it’s laid. The heavy feeding and quiet house over CNY let the colony lay hard — then that generation hatches once you’re home and relaxed, thinking you’d dodged it.

That two-week lag is exactly why the weeks after CNY are peak season for pest control bookings across Malaysia. If you want the full mechanism, we broke it down in why pest problems keep recurring.

“Baru ni tiba-tiba rumah saya penuh dengan serangga. Lipas, semut.”

— Ahmad Iqbal Zulkefli. The classic post-holiday scene: you come back and suddenly the house is full of lipas and semut. It rarely comes out of nowhere — it’s the food and the empty house catching up with you.

What to do before you balik kampung

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Ten minutes before you lock up saves you a month of chasing lipas. Quick checklist:

• Fill every drain trap and pour a little cooking oil in. Run water down each floor trap and sink, then add a spoon of oil — it floats on top and slows the water underneath from evaporating, so the seal holds while you’re away. This one step does the most.
• Seal all the festive food. Kuih, snacks, and mandarin oranges into airtight containers or the fridge. An open tin of love letters is a cockroach dinner bell.
• Clear and bag the bins. Don’t leave a full rubbish bin sitting in the kitchen for five days. Take it out before you go.
• Wipe down and place bait. A quick wipe of the counters and stove, then a few gel bait dots at the back of the kitchen cabinets, keeps any early arrivals in check.

Same logic works for any big festive travel — we put together a fuller version for pest prep before Hari Raya too.

What if the pests already boomed?

Too late for prevention? First rule: don’t reach for the aerosol can on the kitchen colony. Repellent spray scatters German cockroaches into other rooms, so you turn one problem into three. Clean up the festive food and crumbs first to remove the competing buffet, then put gel bait at the cabinet hinges, in cracks, and behind appliances. Bait gets carried back and clears the nest you can’t see. More on why in why cockroaches keep coming back after spraying.

If it’s a full boom — lipas out in daylight, egg cases on the cabinet undersides, ants marching in multiple trails — that’s an established colony, and DIY will only knock it back. A 3-visit programme over 14 days is built for exactly this: the follow-up visits catch the nymphs as those CNY egg cases hatch, so the whole cycle is broken rather than just trimmed.

At market rates a one-off treatment runs around RM330, with a 3-visit plan around RM550. For reference, Nomobug’s actual prices sit about 10% below that — RM299 for a single visit and RM499 for the 3-visit 14-day plan with a warranty. Post-CNY slots fill fast, so it’s worth a WhatsApp early.