The best solution to poisonous spiders is to introduce a competing species of predator that is harmless to people and pets, such as your average run of the mill wolf spider and jumping spiders. House centipedes are also successful counters to many of the spiders you guys seem to be worried about.
Even if these species don't directly kill the offending species (although often times, large house spiders will intentional kill the likes of the hobo spiders and relatives in an attempt to take of their "territory"), If you keep enough around, they will compete for food, and usually, the wandering species will win.
Using insecticides, as i have stated, is a waste of money. While i'm not as concerned as i should be about shooting nerve agents all over my home (although i know most of you are), the fact of the matter is you can't police everywhere. They will always come back, no matter what you do, and the end result is living in fear everyday.
This is why if you see a spider running about, just leave it alone. Unless you recognize it as a deadly species, its not going to do anything, except compete for the territory and likely keep new, worse, spiders from establishing themselves in your home. They will always lurk in the areas their more deadly relatives live, and they will not just let any old spider waltz in and set up shop.
Hopefully, if you live in the regions where spiders like the brown recluse and black widow (or others) live, you know how to identify them, and so you'll know which to remove.
I live in a house near Lake Erie next to a shipping port. We have the Aggressive House Spider here, better known as the Hobo Spider. They are a very close relative of the Brown Recluse and cause bites similar in nature but not quite as bad. I've used every thing I could to kill the things as they don't eat bugs, they are blood suckers. (and I've got the scars to prove it) I have now found that if I sprinkle trails of 20 Mule Team Borax around my bed and home they die when they walk through it. It gets into their lungs. These spiders are not web spinners, they hide in cracks in the walls. Try sprinkling the 20 Mule Team Borax around...it works on fleas also.
I'm sorry, but there are so many things wrong with this post. wall1
The Hobo spider does not naturally occur near lake erie. Rather, they occur in the pacific northwest. your spider is probably something else.
They aren't exactly that closely related to the recluse, despite the similar bites.
I've never heard of a bloodsucking spider in North America, and just to make sure i wasn't unaware, i looked it up. There isn't. I suspect something else was sucking your blood, despite your scars. the hobo spiders do hunt other arthropods.
Spiders do not have lungs. They have a seperate system of vessels (called trachea) that transport air through out the animal. While the borax might interfere with this, i suspect that it has a lot more to do with it inhibiting essential enzymes to the spider, or dehydrating it.
Hobo spiders are in fact webspinners, and belong to a group of spiders known as funnel-web spiders.
depending on the time of the year, you might find the males running out and about out of the webs in search of females. Other than that, they tend to set up funnels shaped webs in undisturbed, protected areas and come out of the sheltered bottom of the funnel when something stumbles on the web.
way to make me reveal just how much of a nerd i can be! Insects and spiders were my hobby before trains. I still keep current on them, they are fascinating.
in the end it worries me though. I don't expect people to be experts, but things like spiders and other similar creatures get so blown out of proportion sometimes that it amazes me.