It is the stuff of home owners' nightmares - your great Australian dream being eaten away at its foundations.

In the world of pest management every professional has their own horror story, and after working in the industry for 15 years Roberto Arroyo's is up there with the best.

"The worst house I've seen was in Leichhardt," he says. "The owners had gone overseas for six months, and when they came back termites had destroyed the whole house. The door jambs, flooring structure and roof were gone - only the bricks were OK."

The extent of Australia's termite problem is difficult to determine, because home owners are often reluctant to document their dwelling's history of termite infestation. But according to Archicentre, the building advisory service of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, which conducts about 1000 pre-purchase inspections in NSW every year, 9 per cent of houses across the state are affected. With an average repair cost of $7000, and severe damage running much higher, complacent home owners could be left seriously out of pocket.

And ignoring the problem in the hope it will go away is not an option.

"One of the problems is that clients don't act," says the NSW manager of Archicentre, Angus Kell.

"People should potentially be inspecting every six to 12 months, but quite often it's five years or more. That means there's a far greater chance of having a high infestation of termites, and the method of rectifying the problem is far more complex."

Traditionally termite control has been an unpleasantly toxic experience. Until a change of regulation in the 1990s, termites were eradicated from interiors using arsenic trioxide dust. Two weeks later controllers would return to check the process had worked, and treat the soil outside the building with a toxic spray to keep termites from re-entering.

However, Arroyo did not want to work like this.

"I was seeing things I didn't agree with; there was lots of spraying of chemicals just for the sake of it. It's not nice to work with. There are health issues involved, plus a lot of the chemicals are broad spectrum - they may kill spiders, or lizards. There's no need to do that."

In 2000 Arroyo opened his own pest management business, Ecologistics, and uses the most environmentally preferable options available. He chooses baiting over sprays and deters termites by improving ventilation to remove the damp environment the pests enjoy. Although the company has grown 300 per cent in the past four years, customers still need information about the best environmental choices.

"Most people think it's easier to spray," he says. "I'm trying to educate them that they don't need to. We are reluctant to spray chemicals, so we concentrate on baiting systems, which work extremely well."

Although baiting systems still use chemicals, the arsenic-based products of the past are no longer permitted. And because baiting systems are placed around the outside of the house, termite populations are forced out into the open where they can be seen - encouraging action before the damage gets out of hand.

But it is new home owners who have the greenest options at their disposal. The same regulations that prohibited arsenic-based sprays in the mid-1990s led to a boom for companies like Termimesh, which specialises in physical termite barriers. Its stainless steel mesh barrier is built into the foundations, where it acts like a termite flyscreen.

"When the more toxic sprays were banned, those allowed to be used didn't last long enough," says Termimesh's regional manager, Clive Holmes. "You can't get back under the slab to reapply once the house is built, so products like ours suddenly became viable."

While Termimesh and other physical-barrier systems, such as Granitgard (which uses fine stone particles), offer peace of mind for new home owners, experts agree that owners of established homes are generally ignorant about termite prevention.

"People have heavily landscaped gardens and take them right up to the building, creating fantastic breeding grounds for termites," Kell says. "Owners should ensure they don't landscape right up to the building edge, so they don't give termites the potential to go from the garden into the house without being seen."

Another common mistake is to pile up mulch adjacent to the wall of the house. "Termites love warm, damp environments, so piles of mulch can make a bridge they use to travel inside through the brickwork."

Left unchecked, termites can work fast. Kell recalls a building site where bales of hay had become wet and then warmed in the summer heat.

"We had sucrose develop in the hay, and between the hay, the water and the warmth, the bales were totally eaten hollow within two weeks."

Aside from vigilance in the garden and regular inspections, Kell recommends using a pest controller recognised by the Australian Environmental Pest Managers Association.