“...the PS4 also has the most to offer as a roach hotel.”

April 17, 2017 4:22 PM

Console Repairmen Explain Why Cockroaches Love PS4s [Kotaku] “The PS4’s design accommodates roaches better than other consoles’ because its ventilation grates are wider. Those vents are located at the bottom of the console, so roaches can get in with ease. Also, according to repair professionals, the PS4’s insides gets hotter than the Xbox One’s because of its internal power supply. Warm, in an enclosed space and close to the floor, PS4s are great roach nesting grounds.”
posted by Fizz (42 comments total)

PS4 & Cockroaches [YouTube]
posted by Fizz at 4:28 PM on April 17, 2017

*shudders*
posted by asteria at 4:39 PM on April 17, 2017 [3 favorites]

It's been nice knowing you all. I'm never using electronics again.
posted by randomkeystrike at 4:42 PM on April 17, 2017 [11 favorites]

Ok wow I am a good person what did I do to deserve this knowledge

thank you for this informative post nonetheless fizz
posted by Hermione Granger at 4:44 PM on April 17, 2017 [14 favorites]

My friend sent me this and I nearly vomited at work reading it. I just got a PS4 and I haven't seen any cockroaches in my house/room, so I hope I'm okay.
posted by gucci mane at 4:44 PM on April 17, 2017

that one video with "roach spoofing" consists of non-conductive sealant all over the place, as well as sprinkling Diatomaceous earth everywhere. Seems really messy but I suppose that's one way to keep them from shorting out your power supply.

* is thankful his PS4 is still sitting in the box because he's had no time for consoles *
posted by numaner at 4:44 PM on April 17, 2017

I recently upgraded my PS4 drive using this guide. It was remarkably easy! So easy I assume the drive was designed to be user-upgradeable. Certainly Sony has gone out of its way to make it easy to backup and restore to a new disk.

But no one mentioned the risk of roaches.
posted by Nelson at 4:53 PM on April 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

I just got a PS4 and I haven't seen any cockroaches in my house/room, so I hope I'm okay.

I do not own a console but I do have a PC and I make sure that I dust with pressurized air and keep all my fan vents clear, overheating is something I obsess about. Bugs are also frequently attracted to PCs as well. Any place warm and dark.
posted by Fizz at 5:03 PM on April 17, 2017

I just got a PS4 and I haven't seen any cockroaches in my house/room, so I hope I'm okay.

Have you considered that the reason you're not seeing any roaches is because they've all moved into your PS4 already? Not meaning to worry you or anything, just saying it could be. I'm sure it's not. Maybe.

Just keep an ear out for faint rustling noises coming from your PS4
posted by Hairy Lobster at 5:10 PM on April 17, 2017 [31 favorites]

I just got a PS4 and I haven't seen any cockroaches in my house/room, so I hope I'm okay.

Well, here's the thing. It depends upon where you live. When I lived in apartments in NYC you pretty much accepted a certain amount of roaches. No matter how clean you are, they are going to be around. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying or deluded. OTOH when I had a house in Brooklyn the only roaches we saw were in the basement during the summer. They came in through the washing machine drain.

In a detached house you can pretty much keep clean enough to keep them at bay. If you never see one the odds are that you don't have them. Now I live in a townhouse in Orlando. We see one once in a blue moon and terminate with extreme prejudice. The ones flying around outside are a bit unnerving, though.
posted by Splunge at 5:33 PM on April 17, 2017 [5 favorites]

Cc @Infinite_Scream
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:40 PM on April 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

Addendum: When I lived in the Brooklyn house I decided to throw some old parrot food in the front yard. Feed the local birds, right? HUGE mistake. That night I went out on the front porch and the front yard was swarming with roaches. The food has a certain sugar content and it seems it smells really good to cockroaches. The yard looked like a scene from a mummy movie. You know the one, with the swarming scarabs? I got out the bug spray. Many a bug met their maker that bloody evening.
posted by Splunge at 5:41 PM on April 17, 2017 [10 favorites]

ALL the electronics in my residence are roach-and-smaller-crawly-bug magnets. The last new laptop I owned stopped working and I sent it to the warranty address. Two weeks later it came back - declared "warranty void" because the repair people opened it up and found a colony of bugs - they didn't even close it backup; sent it back bugs and all. Ever since, I've relied on cheaply bought used/reconditioned laptops that I periodically spray with Raid but still expect a lifespan of less than a year.

My latest tech acquisition is a pacemaker for my weak heart, and it connects wirelessly to a bedside device that sends periodic status updates to my cardiologist's office. And I have caught cockroaches poking around any possible access portal to it more than once. Definitely in the "will not end well" department.
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:56 PM on April 17, 2017 [6 favorites]

Well, here's the thing. It depends upon where you live. When I lived in apartments in NYC you pretty much accepted a certain amount of roaches. No matter how clean you are, they are going to be around. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying or deluded.

Ditto the entire state of Florida. Anyone that tries to palm them off as "Palmetto bugs" is equally deluded.
posted by RolandOfEld at 6:03 PM on April 17, 2017 [4 favorites]

That's the problem with being an early adopter. You're bound to stumble across some bugs in the system.
posted by dephlogisticated at 6:04 PM on April 17, 2017 [24 favorites]

There's a "Heeeeeere's Roachie! Everyone's favorite guy!" / "...But he was the RADDEST roach." joke to be made in here, but I can't think of it.
posted by supercres at 6:28 PM on April 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

Oh god oh god oh god.

So for a bit, I lived in a crappy cheap apartment. I kept it as cleans as possible and we bombed the place frequently. But there were still roaches everywhere. This was just a fact of life.

(Apartment was OK otherwise, which I know sounds like a weird thing to say, but it's true.)

Anyway, the roaches got in my coffee maker. The last straw with that was when I found one the basket, although they had gotten into the bottom's heat element.

I switched to a French press after that because at least you can clean that daily.

I guess ... sometimes you just put up with things when you're broke and you're young. But yeah, never again.
posted by darksong at 6:48 PM on April 17, 2017 [4 favorites]

we bombed the place frequently

You know what bug bombs do? They kill the stupid bugs. The smart bugs don't even notice them.

Source: Father-in-law is an exterminator. He makes a LOT of money.
posted by Splunge at 6:56 PM on April 17, 2017 [2 favorites]

So...even cockroaches prefer the PS4 over an XBox?
posted by Thorzdad at 7:29 PM on April 17, 2017 [12 favorites]

Heh. My first ever apartment was in Washington Heights in Manhattan. It was a pure dump. We had what we called the rat roach cycle. For a while we'd have tons of roaches. But eventually the rats would start to eat the roaches. Then we'd have rats all over. Running under the floor boards and above, in the ceiling. The rats in the ceiling were so cute. We'd hear them run, skitter skitter skitter and then hear them hit a pipe. BING! Eventually the rats would die from lack of roaches to eat. Then the roaches would return to eat the dead rats. The smell at times was... incredible. Luckily we also had a cat. He would often leave us a gift of a large rat under the rug in front of our kitchen sink.

One day, in a haze of weed smoke, I thought it would be a good idea to put a dead rat in a plastic bag and tape it, with a note, to the landlord's door. This was shortly after a friend from Detroit came to visit. She was sleeping in a sleeping bag in the kitchen. The GF and I slept in a back room.

One day I heard someone slamming upon the front door. I think you can see where this is going.

The GF and I heard a lot of screaming. Eventually it stopped. Then Tracy came into our room and freaked out.

This guy just spent the last hour screaming at me! Something about ratta! What the fuck is a ratta? What's going on? What did I do? I just got here! I can't deal with this! How often does this happen?

Then she went into the bathroom to cry.

It took me a while to recall why the landlord would scream at her. When I did, I explained it to the GF.

We had a great laugh about it.

We were kids. Don't judge us.
posted by Splunge at 7:41 PM on April 17, 2017 [10 favorites]

I kind of love that this thread has slightly derailed into horrific roach stories. Not that I want to keep on derailing but let me share my story.

The very first apartment my family lived in was clean enough but like any other apartment complex, when you have that many people concentrated into one area, you're bound to have an infestation. Especially as this was in Texas.

So it's the middle of the summer and we do not have air conditioning. So I'm sweating in my room. I wake up in the middle of the night and I feel something moist and damp behind my neck. Then I feel an itch. I reach back behind my neck and in my hand is a cockroach. I threw that shit across the room and jumped out of my bed and screamed. I was maybe 10 or 11.

Our family moved out of the apartment shortly after into our very first home. To this day, I still have a severe fear of roaches. I can still feel that sickly slimy, sweaty, middle of the night feeling. It makes me shudder.
posted by Fizz at 7:52 PM on April 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

So...even cockroaches prefer the PS4 over an XBox?

Microsoft is paying them - its the only way FreeBSD is buggy.
posted by rough ashlar at 7:57 PM on April 17, 2017

I'm so glad to live in a city where roaches are rare. I think that I've seen three of them in the last quarter century here and they all died quickly. I grew up in Jersey where they're pretty common and hate the fuckers with a passion.
posted by octothorpe at 8:04 PM on April 17, 2017

In my suburbs, we get a lot of stinkbugs. Luckily for my electronics they prefer light over darkness, but also heat. So once a year, usually when summer ends, I would check my lamp in my room, and it's always got some dead stinkbugs in there. I don't know how they trap themselves! This was probably the worst of it [CW: lots of dead stinkbugs around a lightbulb].
posted by numaner at 8:15 PM on April 17, 2017

Anyone that tries to palm them off as "Palmetto bugs" is equally deluded.

I thought that was a name for the flying kind. One of those bastards severely traumatized me about age 2 or 3 - flying right at me.

I had a roach problem once, in a terrible apartment. I found some living in an extension cord. They do like electrical things.
posted by thelonius at 8:48 PM on April 17, 2017

I had a bunch of Argentine ants turn a Roku into a nest.

Thankfully I was not single at the time and my other half took care of it because I ran out of the room screaming when I realized where the trail of ants was leading and why.
posted by elsietheeel at 9:26 PM on April 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

It was remarkably easy! So easy I assume the drive was designed to be user-upgradeable. Certainly Sony has gone out of its way to make it easy to backup and restore to a new disk.

Yes, this is one of the few non-user-hostile things Sony has done. Even the older PS3's had really easy hard disks to swap out, and my lord the speed improvement from an SSD was amazing.

Now, let's talk about trying to maintain a single PS online account and its purchases across two consoles. Grrrrrr.
posted by rokusan at 9:55 PM on April 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

I had a tiny JVC TV destroyed by roaches. They got on, nested and then ate all the glue from the connections. The TV ran all four available broadcast channels simultaneously, which rendered the TV unwatchable. It was like turning on a gray acid trip.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 12:03 AM on April 18, 2017 [4 favorites]

I'm guessing that the PS4's case was designed more with keeping the larger Japanese variety of cockroaches out and never properly localised for territories with smaller cockroaches.
posted by acb at 1:47 AM on April 18, 2017 [1 favorite]

It may be a derail, but thanks for another reason to not live in New York. Or Florida. We get stink bugs, but so long as you don't crush them, they're easy to deal with.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:48 AM on April 18, 2017 [2 favorites]

Anyone that tries to palm them off as "Palmetto bugs" is equally deluded.

I thought that was a name for the flying kind. One of those bastards severely traumatized me about age 2 or 3 - flying right at me.

Yeah so the only ones I've seen fly are the giant "waterbugs" or whatever. These are the ones that are 3-4 inches long. We used to get them at my mom's house where they would come up in the crack between the original foundation of the house and the sunroom added on to the back.

It was always explained to me that roaches were the tiny (1 inch or so) ones and waterbugs were the big ones that fly.
posted by LizBoBiz at 5:57 AM on April 18, 2017

A) Does the link feature photos of roaches?

B) Does it at least tell you how to keep them out?

I can't hang if A is true, but I'd be willing to do a text-only version if B was true.
posted by obtuser at 6:26 AM on April 18, 2017

Roaches here are much smaller, which meant they could populate a PS2 slim (the later models with internal PSU). I usually hated having to buy (and sell) consoles because a lot could go wrong. Roaches were one of the problems that was hard to detect except in one case. Because you pushed the button to flip the tray, and there was a couple of them walking around. Flip them to an empty coke can, then turn it around, and fatty here got stuck trying to get outside. Yeah, nope. Tossed it in a bag and a plastic bin, and wait until there was two of us to deal with the problem before there was an infestation in the store. One time our boss was buying up a bunch of games, and one of them had a colony inside. The box was slightly chipped on a corner, and it probably laid on top of something that heated up (the plastic was also a bit crinkly), like a set top box or something, which turned it into a cozy cockroach motel.

At a point I stopped wondering if I ever sold a console with roaches inside them. It became a matter of how many.
posted by lmfsilva at 7:44 AM on April 18, 2017

Roaches are one of the things I'm really not looking forward to as yet another cost of climate change. One benefit of living in a place with a hard winter is that persistent pests like roaches (and ants and termites) have a harder life here. We have them in Ottawa, but they're easier to get rid of and stay gotten rid of for longer. They have little opportunity for living native, so there's no natural reservoir to repopulate homes. They're relatively uncommon now.

As the winters get warmer and the springs earlier, as we change from Zone 4 to Zone 5, we're going to have the same problems I remember from southern Ontario up here in the valley.
posted by bonehead at 8:01 AM on April 18, 2017 [1 favorite]

You guys . . . you guys know the PS4 isn't actually generating the roaches, right?

Like if you don't live in a place where cockroaches are a problem, you are unlikely to develop a problem because of the console; they just like to hang out in places such as the console.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:33 AM on April 18, 2017

You guys . . . you guys know the PS4 isn't actually generating the roaches, right?

Prove it.
posted by asteria at 10:21 AM on April 18, 2017 [7 favorites]

I used to work for a national video rental store chain. Our store was also a retail outlet for TVs ('giant' 20" console TVs!) and VCRs, and offered repair services.

In my first three months, I lost track of the number of VCRs we returned to the customer, wrapped in multiple trash bags, with a note "WILL NOT FIX - COCKROACH INFESTATION".

*shudder*
posted by hanov3r at 12:21 PM on April 18, 2017 [3 favorites]

You guys . . . you guys know the PS4 isn't actually generating the roaches, right?

Interestingly, the PS4 comes with a demo disc that does its very best to convince you that hundreds of tiny little robot things are literally living inside your controller, sliding this way and that when you move and tilt it, and dancing like disco bugs when you press various buttons.

So.
posted by rokusan at 8:21 PM on April 18, 2017 [2 favorites]

That seems like an excellent way to have an expensive controller destroyed by a 24-lb. Maine Coon.

_{why is this entire conversation pushing me closer to buying a ps4? WTH brain?}
posted by aspersioncast at 7:52 AM on April 19, 2017 [2 favorites]

All this time I though Geralt was talking about his horse.
posted by inpHilltr8r at 12:13 PM on April 19, 2017

I'm reminded of this novel....
posted by Chrysostom at 3:11 PM on April 19, 2017

So, this would be a good way to cultivate stock for my Cockroach-milk juicing startup?
posted by lkc at 3:51 PM on April 19, 2017 [1 favorite]