Ants in RV living spaces can be a real problem — one that many RVers have encountered from time to time. Depending on where you camp, you may have had ants get into your rig. Maybe you nailed ’em and then didn’t think much more about it. But maybe you found yourself with a significant ant problem that required more serious attention.
In this post, we share several natural ways to rid your RV of ants and keep ’em out. We also cover a few hard-hitting methods of eliminating a colony that’s set up camp inside your RV.
Let’s do this!
How Do Ants Get Into an RV?
The short answer to this question is any way they can! Ants can find their way into an RV through any tiny crevice available or even on your shoes, clothing, or pets. They can be on low-hanging branches above your campsite (no, they don’t always remain on the ground) and find their way into your rig via the roof.
The same is true from underneath. They have numerous paths into your rig from the ground, and any part of your RV that touches the ground is a highway for ants. Your sewer hose, jacks, water hose, power cords, etc., are all routes into your rig for ants.
How Do I Keep Ants from Getting Into My RV?
There’s no way to close up an RV tightly enough to keep ants out. The trick is to avoid making your rig attractive as a food source. Because food is all they’re interested in. The first order of business is to make your rig as boring and unattractive to ants as possible.
Remove Possible Food Sources
All ants care about is food, so it’s the main reason they’ll try to get inside your RV. You may have seen our post on how to keep invasive mice out of your RV for good. We mentioned that the first line of defense is not making food available to attract mice in the first place. The very same is true for ants. If you spill soda or juice on the floor, for example, clean it up immediately with your favorite cleaner or a 50/50 mixture of vinegar & water.
Keep a spray bottle of cleaner handy, because leaving a sugary mixture on your floor or countertop is a sure way to advertise your rig as a great place for ants to congregate. While crumbs are always an attractive food source, ants love sugar and have a highly sensitive radar for finding it.
Even the smallest crumbs left on the floor or counter can attract ants!
Cleaning up spills and small messes is key. Sweep, wash your hard-surfaced floors, and vacuum, vacuum, vacuum. Check out our our vacuuming tips, and if you don’t have a vacuum for your rig, check out our post on the best RV vacuums for all sizes of RVs. And don’t forget the garbage! Keeping trash inside your RV is a great way to attract ants and other critters, particularly if it contains food particles. Take out the trash as often as possible.
Food storage is also important. You’ll also want to store foods in glass jars or plastic containers. Any foods that aren’t in your fridge or freezer are available to ants (and mice)! Storing food items in airtight containers is your best bet to stop them from attracting ants. They can find their way into plastic bags even if you think they’re well-sealed.
Airtight containers are camping investments that pay off over and over again. Buy ’em once and use them for years. Keeping ants, mice, and other pests out of your RV’s living space is well worth the effort and expense.
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- Great for pet food; easy to clean and scoop food from, and tight lids keep out moisture and humidity
Use Outside Barriers
If you’re camping in areas with lots of ants, you may want to set up a few barriers to entry. Here are a few methods RVers have used to keep ants from “crossing the line” to gain entry.
Chalk
This will only work if you’re parked on a hard surface, but many RVers swear by the chalk line. You simply use chalk to draw a circle/rectangle around the perimeter of your RV, and ants supposedly won’t cross that line.
This won’t repel any ants you already have on board. But, apparently, it creates a barrier that ants are likely to avoid. If you’re staying for a while, you’ll need to replace your chalk line if it rains. Don’t buy the fancy “dustless” type of chalk… for this purpose, the dust is desirable.
- Product Type:Writing Instrument
- Item Package Weight:0.022 Pounds
Diatomaceous Earth
Diatomaceous Earth is composed of organic minerals from seawater. Unfortunately for ants, it’ll kill ’em by literally drying them out. For this reason, you’ll see Diatomaceous Earth listed in our section on how to get rid of ants as well!
You can keep ants from entering your rig by sprinkling Diatomaceous Earth around and under the RV as well as on your power cord, sewer hose, water line, tires, jacks, etc. But beware of the fine dust in this stuff. While it’s supposed to be safe around pets and humans, it’s best to wear a disposable mask to keep the fine dust from irritating your throat, airway, and lungs when you’re putting it out.
And, like the chalk, if it gets wet, it’ll need to be replaced.
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Vasoline
RVers in areas where ants are a real problem are often advised to put Vasoline (or any generic petroleum jelly) around the great ant highways into the rig. These would include the top of the sewer hose where it enters the rig, power cords, jacks, and other common entry points.
The idea is that even if ants make their way up your sewer hose, power cord, jacks, etc., they’ll hit the Vasoline barrier and not make it inside.
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How to Get Rid of Ants in an RV
If you’ve already got ants in your RV, there are a number of things you can do to get rid of them. First, a couple of notes…
Pheromone scent trails are how ants communicate to let other ants know where the goods are. They produce and emit chemicals that they leave behind as they move. The trails lead directly to the food sources they find and mark their territory.
If you need to get rid of an existing ant problem, you can’t simply kill the ants in your rig because the pheromone trails they’ve left behind will attract more ants. So, when you’re cleaning the rig, you also need to clean up those trails. You can wash off pheromone trails with soapy water or a mixture of white vinegar & water, then apply your choice of deterrents.
Let’s take a look at several ways to deal with ants in an RV, beginning with what we always prefer: natural options. These are safer for rigs with pets and children, so they score high in our book. At the end of the section, we’ll also include some high-powered chemical methods for getting rid of ants if you don’t have pets or children in your rig, or if natural methods don’t do the trick.
Baking Soda + Confectioners Sugar
Some RVers report good luck getting rid of ants using a combination of baking soda and confectioners sugar. The sugar attracts the ants to your homemade ant bait, and the baking soda eventually kills them.
Mix the sugar and the baking soda, and they’ll eat both and be pushing up daisies. You can put the mixture (or any of the other substances below) on a flat piece of tin foil or paper plates (just be sure to cut the plates in half to provide easy access).
Cinnamon
If ants come into contact with plain old food-grade cinnamon, it can kill them. It’s best to prevent the ants from coming on board in the first place. Stopping an ant infestation before it starts is better than having to rid your rig of them after they’re already a problem.
Cinnamon also smells good and isn’t toxic to pets or humans.
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Peppermint Oil
Ants don’t like strong smells, and peppermint oil is potent! Placing cotton balls scented with peppermint oil can get rid of ants and deter them in the first place.
Another reason to use a strong-smelling product like peppermint oil is that one way to neutralize pheromone trails is to overwhelm the scent with a stronger scent. Peppermint oil is strong enough to distract ants from the pheromone trails left to bring them into your rig.
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Vinegar + Water
Vinegar (another strong-smelling product) is a great cleaner when mixed with water. Using a 50/50 mixture of vinegar and water can wipe out pheromone trails, but will do a great job of cleaning RV surfaces.
You can grab vinegar at your grocery store, but you’ll need a spray bottle to combine it with water and spray it around the rig.
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Bay Leaves or Mint Leaves
Once you’ve cleaned with vinegar or another cleaner, you can place bay leaves or mint leaves placed around the RV as a non-toxic, completely natural ant deterrent.
If you’ve got a severe ant infestation, the leaves likely won’t be enough. You’ll need to use the leaves in combination with cleaning and possibly other methods of ridding your RV of ants, depending on the extent of the problem.
Boric Acid or Diatomaceous Earth + Sugar/Honey
Now we’re moving on to a few heavier hitters that aren’t as completely natural and non-toxic, so be aware of that as we move forward with more serious solutions.
We mentioned Diatomaceous Earth as an outside deterrent to entry. It can also be used to kill ants once they’re inside your RV, but remember: this is fine dust, so use caution if you use it inside.
Boric acid combined with sugar or honey is a suggestion we’ve seen repeatedly. One way to use it to get rid of ants is to combine a teaspoon of boric acid with 4 teaspoons of sugar/honey in hot water.
Mix the boric acid with the sugar/honey first, and then dissolve it in about a cup of hot water. Stir until the mixture is dissolved, and then douse cotton balls with the mixture and place outside (near nests, especially) and, if necessary, inside your RV. This will kill ants and also deter them from setting up shop in your rig.
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Combat Max Ant Killing Bait Stations
A few commercial ant bait products have been successful for some RVers who don’t travel with pets or children. Just remember to use these in conjunction with a good cleaning process and food storage practices. Be sure to read any precautions in the instructions.
This one from Combat comes in the form of ant cups that can be strategically placed around the RV.
- Combat Max Ant Killing Bait starts killing ants overnight.
- It's formulated to provide long-lasting ant killing power.
Terro Liquid Bait
Terro’s liquid ant bait is relatively popular as an ant killer, but it can literally attract ants into your RV, so it’s best to use it outside the rig.
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- KILLS THE ANTS YOU DON'T SEE: TERRO ant bait is designed to share with the entire colony, eliminating both visible ants and those hidden, using liquid...
Hot Shot Indoor Fogger
Finally, if you have a severe or persistent infestation of ants in your RV, you can have the rig fogged or do it yourself with a product such as this one from Hot Shot. This is a last resort approach, but it will kill most insects (including bed bugs!), so it’s worth a look if you’ve got a very heavy infestation.
You’d want to use a product like this when you aren’t planning to be on board the RV for a while.
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Have You Dealt with Ants in Your RV?
As always, we love to hear about your experience and what has (or hasn’t) worked for you.
Drop us a comment and let us know if you’ve had to deal with ants and how you successfully treated the issue.
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Jay
Saturday 18th of January 2025
Reading these ant horror stories, we've been lucky to have never encountered them in our motorhomes to any significant extent. However, we had persistent problems in our home. For what it's worth, the bait stations never seemed to work. The defoggers and sprays would kill them only to see them come back the next day. I would not recommend using defoggers inside an RV because it will end up going everywhere including into places that aren't affected by the ants and that would require cleaning all of your dishes, pots and pans, etc.
We have not tried any of the "natural" solutions including using boric acid but I'll tell you what did work. We have never needed to call an exterminator, I'm certainly not one and I haven't played one on TV.
A relevant digression: In south TX, mosquitos can be a real problem. For them, I use a product called Bifen I/T (similar to Talstar) that contains the insecticide bifenthrin, plus I add an insect growth regulator (ISG). I obtained them online from DoMyOwn.com where there is diverse information and recommendations for various pests. These 2 agents (6 ml of the insecticide and 1 ml of the ISG) are mixed together in 1 gallon of water and administered through a gasoline-powered backpack sprayer for mosquitos. We have a large property and I might spray 5 gallons of the stuff. I wear protective clothing and a respirator when doing this because it is a mist that I spray all over the property outside our home a few times a year. Now, I know that we're not talking about mosquitos or real houses, for that matter, but hang in there!
I noticed a marked decrease in the number of bugs inside the house when using this. I then read the instructions for ants that said the same insecticide combination can also be used at the same concentrations inside a house using a small pump sprayer (obtained from Tractor Supply). If I didn't have a pump sprayer, an old Windex sprayer would also work, just not as convenient or fast (and your hand may get tired from squeezing it). I sprayed inside the house around the baseboards, under and around sinks, window sills and outside the window and the ground below the effected windows where those ants were seen. I did not use a respirator for this but did wear nitrile gloves. If used in an RV, due to the close quarters inside an RV, after spraying this, I recommend leaving the unit and not re-entering it for at least a day. So far, one application has kept the ants away for over 2 years, which is remarkable, and that includes after the usual floor mopping and general cleaning in those areas!
Obviously, this insecticide is a fairly persistent agent. If all else has failed, you do have this option. Make sure you read the instructions and obey the warnings when using it. (How does this compare for the mosquitos? Not as well as on the ants, I'll tell you. The mosquitos will be gone for 2 weeks and then slowly come back, most likely repopulating from areas outside the treated area.)
James G Christian
Saturday 18th of January 2025
In 2021 we took a trip south. I think every state we stopped in we picked up a different species of ants. I used the foggers when we got home. Living in a wooded area I have to use it in the house a couple times a year also.
Debora Rose
Thursday 20th of July 2023
We woke up from a one night stay to tiny black ants in our living room area of our Solitude 373 FBR. I wiped as much as I could with straight vinegar & ant spray before we excaped! We cannot wait to get parked for a long stay & try these methods! Thank you all ❤️
Kathy Tole
Sunday 18th of June 2023
I've tried several remedies for ant infestations. The most successful has been 1 part borax (20 Mule Team type) and 2 parts confectioner's sugar. I use it near my rig (in water bottles with a small hole in them) when in storage and at long-term stays. I even use it at home. It seems to obliterate every type of ant that visits.
mot
Saturday 21st of January 2023
Mix mint jelly with diomatatious (sp?) Earth. Put in a small 1-2" diameter open & flat container. They come eat carry it home & every ant comes to the banquet to die. We've used this for 40+ years. Might put a small stick with a bit of bait on it so they can get into the goop.