Swiftlet House FAQ

Start at the entrance hole. The level line, the angle and the light at the entrance rule everything else. Until the birds can fly in smoothly, airflow and humidity are not real problems yet.

Most people start by adjusting temperature and humidity, or changing the sound. That is starting from step two. Get the order wrong and everything you spent before that is wasted.

Next, look at how aged your nesting planks are. Old, dirty, mouldy planks mean the birds can come in but will not stay. That layer goes together with the entrance.

And one more thing most people never think of giving us: record the sound inside the house.

It is simple. Stand on the floor, about six feet away from the wall, and record a clip. No special timing, no special gear, your phone is enough. With that clip our reading gets a lot sharper.

Send the photos and that recording together and we will look for free. See the Diagnosis Method

There is no single answer to this one, but there are a few very common roots, and most of them are not the sound.

People who are stuck have one thing in common: they keep changing the sound. Years of changing, and the number is still the same number.

Here are four directions. You can check half of each one today, just by walking into the house:

One, dead flow. No fresh air is coming in at all. This is the classic reason a house grows to a certain number and then stops.
What to look at: where the nests are built, and what number the house stopped at. More in “When you talk about layer three airflow, what are you actually looking at?”

Two, the sound coverage is wrong. Not that the sound is unpleasant. The coverage.
What to look at: whether the birds avoid the tweeters when they nest, or build behind them. If so, that tweeter is chasing them away, not attracting them. More in “If the sound coverage is wrong, how do the birds react?”

Three, the layout can no longer keep up with the bird count. That layout was right when there were few birds. Once the flock grows, the same layout becomes the bottleneck.
Think of a kampung. One road is enough for a few people. More people, and that road jams. More in “Why do you keep asking me to update you?”

Four, the condition of the planks. Old, dirty, mouldy planks mean birds can come in but will not stay. This layer is the one you can act on today, no wall breaking, no structural change.

Why do we not just tell you which one it is? Because the fix for each of the four is completely different, and guessing wrong costs you another year.

Send photos plus a recording of the sound inside. A house that has been stuck for years is usually stuck at the same spot the whole time. Nobody has just sat down and looked at it properly.

Free. That is not a courtesy line. This step should not cost you money in the first place.

After we look at the photos we tell you straight where the problem most likely sits and what to do next. Whether you buy anything comes later. Sometimes the prescription needs no purchase at all. It is knocking down that wall, or opening a second hole.

3 photos, plus one sound recording.

One, the entrance hole, shot from outside facing it straight on.
Two, the flight path, shot from the entrance looking in.
Three, the nesting planks and ceiling, shot looking up from inside.
Four, record the sound inside the house: stand on the floor, about six feet from the wall, record a clip. Your phone is fine.

Anywhere you feel there is a problem, add a photo. Bad photos are fine too. Send first. If we cannot see clearly we will tell you which one to redo.

That is enough for our first look. If we need more (video of the birds flying in and out, sound recorded separately at each position, a floor plan), we will ask you after we have looked. You do not have to prepare everything at once.

Usually these three. How many years has the house been running? Is production dropping, or has it never taken off? Do you manage it yourself or is someone managing it for you?

We are not collecting data. A three year old house and a fifteen year old house can have the exact same “birds not coming in”, for completely different reasons.

If you saw a doctor and the doctor handed you medicine without asking you a single question, would you take it?

You would not, right? But a lot of swiftlet houses are on exactly that kind of medicine. Sound not working? Change the sound. Birds not coming? Buy hormone. Still not working? Try another brand.

If there is no diagnostic reason for it, we will not sell it to you.

Count them in the order the bird passes through.

The hole the bird flies through from outside is the first entrance. Once it is inside, the first door it meets is the second entrance (the second door that birds will pass through in your bird house), which is the second opening on its path.

There is one place a lot of people miscount: if your house has an air well design, the air well counts as the first entrance.

Why do we spell that out? Because if you count wrong, everything after it goes wrong. We say “standing at the second entrance you should be able to see the first entrance”. If you leave the air well out of the count, you are looking at two other openings, that sentence stops working for you, and you still think you got it right.

Not sure how to count yours? Send photos and we will confirm this step for you first.

That name came out of the industry the traditional way.

In the past a lot of birds would come through the first entrance and then circle between the first and the second entrance without going further. Over time people started calling that space the roaming room, as if it was meant to be a room where birds go round in circles.

Our view today is different. Birds roaming there for a long time is itself a problem.

They are not strolling around. They cannot get in. There are three common causes: the design is blocking them, the sound is not tuned right, or there is not enough light. The bird is afraid, or it simply cannot find where the second entrance is, so it stops there and circles.

So this is not a room to be managed. It is a signal to be read. When you see birds circling there for a long time, do not assume that is normal.

One more thing: you do not need to spray hormone there either. A lot of people spray that space heavily. They are spraying a place the bird should not be staying in anyway.

(Water trays are a separate matter. When the house still has no birds, a tray can go there. Once you have a flock, put it where the birds are. Spraying is spraying, trays are trays.)

In plain words: standing at the second entrance, at some angle, you should be able to see the first entrance.

Note that this is not only about height. Left and right count too. If the two holes are offset, up and down or side to side, the bird has to make a hard turn on the way in.

Being able to see through means that stretch is smooth. The bird does not need a sharp mid air turn or a steep dive. Not being able to see through means there is a corner that is too aggressive, or a drop that is too steep.

Swiftlets fly fast. If getting in means doing something awkward, they would rather not. It is a big world out there. They have no reason to take that risk for your house.

The most common mistake we see is making a simple structure complicated. The bird has to clear one obstacle after another, sharp turn after sharp turn, squeeze through a narrow space, and only then it is in. The people who build it that way usually have a reason: they were afraid it would be too bright, they wanted it darker inside, or they wanted to leave the maximum space for nesting.

There are two small observations you can make yourself, right now:

One, how many nests are inside? No nests means the birds do not like going in. Nothing more needs explaining.

Two, if there are plenty of nests inside, go look at the wall outside the second and third entrance and see whether there is a lot of droppings. If there is, it means that every time before going in they circled there for a long while before daring to enter. Fix that stretch and the birds will move in much faster.

Look at the way out the same way. Is there a lot of droppings stuck on the wall? Nobody wants to walk into a place they may not get out of. Birds are the same.

That is why this sits in the first layer of the diagnosis. They have to be able to get in before anything else is worth discussing.

Generally it means the slope from the outer hole down to the second entrance.

But there is a trap here. Slope is not a number you can look at on its own. It is tied to distance. You cannot say that stretching the distance out endlessly solves the slope problem. It is not that cheap.

In practice all four directions can go wrong. Too narrow does not work, too steep does not work, too long does not work, too wide does not work either. These four hold each other in check. Move one and the other three shift.

Think of the bird coming home as a plane landing and it gets easy to understand. Too steep means the flight path is effectively too short, and the plane cannot come down.

So there is no standard answer to copy here. What is right in someone else's house may be exactly wrong in yours. This is also why we insist on seeing photos rather than quoting you a number over the phone.

There are three, and they need to be looked at separately.

One, natural light. How bright the house is in itself.
Two, the setting sun. You have to check whether the evening sun shines straight in. It shining in is not really a big problem. Adjust the position of the second entrance a bit, work it into the design, and it is handled. What matters is the timing. During the stretch when the birds come home, most swiftlet houses have already gone dim. If yours is still bright, that is not what they are used to.
Three, the lights we install ourselves. For this one we first ask what you installed it for. To deter predators, to attract insects, or to attract birds? The three purposes are installed differently. Install for the wrong purpose and the light is on for nothing.

Why does light sit in the first layer? Because if it is too dark, the bird needs more time to feel its way in, and it is afraid. A house that takes a long time to feel out before they dare go deeper is not a house that fails. It is a house that goes much slower.

And in this line of work the expensive part has never been the equipment. It is the time spent waiting.

No. Honestly, during the day we would rather it be brighter. It is easier for the birds to see when they come to play.

What actually matters is the stretch when they come home. By then most swiftlet houses have gone dim, and that is the state they are used to.

So what you look at is the timing, not the brightness on its own. Bright during the day is fine. Still bright at the moment the birds come home is what needs handling.

This is also why we specifically check the setting sun. It is one short window in the whole day. If you do not go and look on purpose, you will not notice it.

Same thing, different name. Flight path is the correct term. Runway is airport language, borrowed from the plane comparison.

It means the stretch of distance the bird needs in order to land.

The way swiftlets fly and feel their way around is a bit like a plane. Understand the bird coming home as a plane landing and it all makes sense. It needs a stretch of distance to come down. When the entrance is too steep, that stretch gets eaten up, which is the same as the runway being too short and the plane not being able to land.

So the flight path and the slope of the entrance have to be looked at together. Some people only fix the entrance without working out how much flight path is left inside, and after the work the birds still cannot get in.

Let us be clear about one thing. We do not encourage you to read this and go modify things yourself.

Take photos and send them to us. It is free. Whether to change anything, and when, is your decision after that.

We have seen a lot of houses, so we can see your blind spot. The things you have not changed by now are probably the things you believe are correct. Looking at it yourself, you simply cannot see the problem.

Because the order cannot be scrambled. If the birds cannot even get in, however good the environment is inside means nothing.

The diagnosis has three layers. Layer one is the level line, the angle and the light at the entrance. Layer two is the flight path and the nesting planks. Layer three is airflow, temperature and humidity, and sound coverage.

Here is a number of our own. We look at houses online all year round and we are close to 150 houses by now. In about nine out of ten of them, the problem is at the entrance, and the birds simply cannot move in any faster.

Most swiftlet houses get diagnosed starting from layer three. That is why the problem never gets found.

Hold on. Most thermometers on the market are not accurate. That is the first problem.

The second is worse. Where you hang it decides what you read. A gauge on the wall measures the wall. The nests are up above, and moisture is heavy, it does not travel up there. Up and down are two different numbers. On top of that, the height of the house, the temperature difference and the wind speed all move the reading.

A number from an inaccurate gauge that you are not sure is hanging in the right place will only mislead your judgement, and it will make you do the wrong thing with a lot of confidence.

Instead of chasing numbers, take a few photos: the exhaust pipe, the second entrance, the spot where you feel the heat is trapped. Send them and we will look at the actual situation.

It is not about who is more skilled. It is the order of the diagnosis.

We start with the level line, the angle and the light at the entrance. That is layer one. Airflow, temperature and humidity are layer three. Look at it in reverse order and you often never see where it is really stuck.

Honestly, I have hired people to come and look at mine too. The money went out and the birds still did not increase. So that tired feeling you have, I know it.

Trust the current one. And I bring this up myself. I do not wait for you to ask.

I published a book in 2012. Looking back today, there are more than ten places in it that are the reverse of what I teach now. Whether nesting planks need washing, whether the external sound should be rotated constantly, whether to build an insect room, on these I wrote the exact opposite of what I say today. In the sections below, I own up to them one by one.

On the first page of that book I wrote a line myself: “What worked in the past may not work today.” That was written in 2011. The first person it caught out is me.

So when you ask which one to trust, my answer is: do not swallow either one whole, including what I say now. What you should be reading is what your house looks like today. Methods expire. The holes and the planks in your house do not.

No, and you should not.

A diagnosis usually turns up more than one problem, but they are not all the same rank. We sort them into four kinds for you:

One, must change. Leave these alone and everything else you do is wasted.
Two, can change. It helps, but it does not have to be this month.
Three, change later. Doing it now would disrupt the first two, or startle the birds already inside.
Four, do not touch. Some things are hard rules. Touch them and there is no going back.

The sequence is the whole point. The same list in the right order saves a house. In the wrong order it wrecks one.

So we will not hand you a “do all of this” list. When there are still birds inside, a big renovation carries more risk than the problem itself.

That is exactly why we insist on gradual work. One big renovation is what disturbs the birds. Done step by step at the right pace, the risk is far lower.

When to move, how much to move, and what to watch for afterwards, we go through all of it with you before anything starts.

Because your update is the condition for us being able to help. You do something, take photos, send them over, we confirm whether it was done right, then fine tune. If you say nothing, we are guessing with our eyes closed.

But there is a more important reason. When the number of birds changes, the house has to change with it.

Think of a kampung. When there are few people, one road is enough. Once there are more people, that road starts to jam. You cannot keep just one forever. You open a second, even a third.

A swiftlet house is the same. That layout was right when there were few birds. Once the flock grows, the same layout becomes the bottleneck.

So there is no set it and forget it in a swiftlet house. What was right a year ago may not be right this year.

We need to know which stage you are at now before we can tell you what to move next. Without your update, what we have in hand is still your house from last year.

Yes. But this deserves a clear explanation.

Traditionally, swiftlet house diagnosis could not be done remotely. If you are not on site, who dares make a call?

But with the knowledge and the technique we have today, there is a way to read it remotely. Send the photos and the recording and we can tell where it is stuck. Not many people can do this.

And an honest reminder. There will be plenty of people telling you they can look remotely too. The question has never been whether someone can look. It is whether they can see the real problem.

A whole round of looking, a whole lot of talking, and the birds still have not increased. That is what counts.

So whether you are in East Malaysia, in Cambodia, or in another country, send it over.

For East Malaysia we also have dealers in Kuching, Sibu, Miri and Sri Aman, so you do not have to wait on shipments from the peninsula to buy things.

Birds that come for a few days and then leave are telling you the problem is mostly not the sound.

The “more birds all of a sudden” you get from a sound change is an illusion. When a new sound first goes on, the birds are curious. After a while it goes back to how it was, because the problem with the house has been sitting there the whole time.

Changing the sound is like advertising a business. Does advertising work? Of course it works. But if your own product is bad and the food does not taste good, heavy advertising only makes you go under faster.

A swiftlet house is the same. You keep calling the birds in, but the inside is not done right, so they come, they get burned, and they stop coming. The louder you call, the more birds find out your house is no good.

This is what we call a blacklist house. It is not one bird deciding not to come. The whole flock has marked your house down, and even the young ones born there do not come back.

Diagnose the real problem first, then talk about sound.

Yes. I was the one teaching you to rotate it.

My 2012 book says the external sound should be changed every two days to a week so the birds do not lose interest. And I did not only write it. I was selling automatic sound changers as well.

What I say today is the reverse. Keep changing it, and eventually they ignore whatever you play.

Why the change? One sentence is enough: if changing the sound could increase birds, there would be no failed swiftlet houses in this world.

External sound is the advertising outside. It calls down the birds flying past. Internal sound is the food inside. It settles the birds that came in and gets them to stay.

However loud the signboard is, if the food is bad the customer sits down and leaves. These two do completely different jobs. You cannot cover one with the other.

There is one key thing about internal sound: it has to mix the sounds of chicks, about-to-fly birds and adult birds. That is what stirs up the urge to mate, and that is what makes them stay.

Split it into external and internal. The answer is different for each.

External sound, we strongly advise against 24 hours. Two very practical consequences:
One, it attracts predators.
Two, the birds sometimes stick around the external tweeter instead of going in to the internal sound. You are keeping them outside your own door.

To be clear, it is not an absolute no. It is not advised.

Internal sound, run it 24 hours in a new house. While there are still no birds inside, the internal sound has to be on all the time.

Once the house already has plenty of birds, you can pick certain periods and switch off for one to two hours so the birds talk among themselves. They do not stay just because you keep singing love songs at them.

So there is no universal answer here. Whether to switch off, and which stretch, depends on the stage your house is at. Same line as always: diagnose your house first.

No. Turn it all the way up and it distorts, and the sound bounces back.

The consequences are very real. Walk in and the sound is a mess, the walls reflect noticeably, the sound is harsh. The birds will not build nests and they will not stay. You are paying an electricity bill to chase birds away.

And something a lot of people do not know: every type of tweeter has its own ceiling. Past that point, turning it up further gives you nothing, because the machine has nothing left to give. What goes up is not attraction. It is noise.

But here is the line that matters most.

You want to turn it up, and most of the time that is not because louder is better. It is because the tweeter is ageing.

The same sound, six to eight months after it went in, and you can hear it has gone quieter. Most people react by turning the volume up. That is using volume to make up for something that is already fading, and it ends with the dial maxed, the sound breaking up, and the birds pushed out.

So when the sound goes quiet, stop for a second. It could be one of three things: ageing, wrong tuning, or a short circuit.

The first two are handled differently, but both are one-off jobs. The third one is not.

If the amplifier is already turned up loud and the sound is still weak, it has most likely shorted. A short circuit will keep burning your machine. You think the tweeter has aged, so you keep turning the volume up, and the more you turn it the faster it burns.

The volume needs to be enough, not maxed.

Not volume. It is how attractive the sound is.

If you have 10 points of attraction, do not spend all of it at the start. 7 or 8 is already very good. Keep 9 and 10 for when you need saving.

Go all out from day one and you have no cards left to play later.

The problem is exactly that it is “the same”.

If you run a business without differentiating yourself, what makes a customer pick you? When every house on the row is playing the same old song, you have to think about playing something else.

And there is a harder layer to it. If your sound is very close to your neighbour's, he only has to be a little better than you inside his house and your advantage is gone. Birds pick the better house. A little is enough.

One more thing to be clear about. Sound really is the first thing a bird meets from a distance. But whether it actually goes in depends on the entrance, on how the sound is tuned, and on the flight path.

His stage, structure and bird count are not yours. The same song that is right in his house may be exactly wrong in yours.

You can try, but go in with your eyes open.

A lot of the sounds circulating out there have passed through many hands. Whether somebody tampered with them along the way, nobody can say. What you have may not be the original any more.

And here is something more people do not know. Different sounds are made to go with different machines. Sounds from Indonesia were made for their players. Their tuning transplanted onto Malaysian equipment is tuning yourself into a dead end.

So “this sound works great in his house” does not mean it works in yours. Different machine, different house, different bird count.

If you are unsure, tell us the sound and the settings you are running now and we will look at it for you.

It should be changed, but the timing matters more than the frequency.

An external sound does go stale after a long run. That part is true. But before you change it, ask yourself one question: can my house actually hold new birds right now?

If the problems inside are not sorted and you rush to change the sound, all you are doing is calling new birds in and letting them find there is no place to stay, or that they still cannot get in smoothly. Calling a batch in and losing a batch is worse than not changing at all, because that batch will not come back.

The order is: handle what needs handling inside, then change the sound.

As for how far the inside has to be sorted before it is worth changing, and the step by step order on the day you switch, that is a whole process taught in the masterclass.

For now, remember one sign you can read yourself. What you watch after a change is not the excitement in the first week. It is whether new birds are still coming on the rainy overcast days one or two weeks later. Excitement lies. Overcast days do not.

First, something that will save you money: do not go and buy an instrument.

What you are judging is not a number. It is whether the sound at that position sounds good, whether it is breaking up, whether it is bouncing back and turning into mush. You cannot measure any of that. You can only hear it.

Same logic as us telling you not to rely on a gauge for humidity. The point you measure is not the point the bird sits at, and a number makes you do the wrong thing with a lot of confidence.

So how do you listen, what are you listening for, what counts as “right”, and which knob do you go back to when you hear a particular problem? That whole thing has to be practised, and we spend a long time on it in the masterclass, because it is a skill that lives in the ears. A couple of sentences will not teach it.

If you want to know right now whether your tuning is right, send us your external sound settings and the situation in your house. We will look for free.

Yes, and that is free too.

A lot of people are not unwilling to spend. They just do not know whether they should. Give us your current external sound settings and the situation in your house, and we will check whether the tuning is right.

The conclusion may well be “your tuning is off, fix the tuning, you do not need a new machine”. If so, that is what we will say. If there is no diagnostic reason for it, we will not sell it to you.

No. Position, angle and the combination matter more than the count.

A thousand tweeters calling at a house the birds cannot get into will still be calling at dawn with nothing to show.

And past a certain point tweeters turn on you. The calling far exceeds the number of birds actually in your house. A bird flies over, it sounds busy inside, it comes in and there are hardly any. Fooled once, there is no second time.

Here is something a lot of people do not believe. In areas that have done well, the number of tweeters goes down over time. A new house gets a lot laid out, and as it takes off they get cut one by one, and it grows better for it.

So on “should I add tweeters”, the answer is often subtract, not add.

First, a common misunderstanding: it is not about watts. The idea that more watts means you can drive more units is wrong.

What limits you is impedance (ohm).

Magnet tweeters (also called coil tweeters) have low impedance to begin with, and most swiftlet houses are wired in parallel. Parallel wiring drags the impedance down: one unit at 8 ohm, two in parallel makes 4 ohm, four in parallel makes 2 ohm.

There are two lines here:

One, 2 ohm. Some amplifiers have “not less than 2 ohm” printed on the back. That is the manufacturer's own spec. Most machines do not print it, but the ones that do print that number.
Two, 1 ohm. That is the floor. Below it the machine burns easily, and that goes for every machine on the market.

So our advice is no more than 4 units per channel. Four brings you right to the 2 ohm line. Any more and you are past what the manufacturer wrote.

This does not depend on brand. As long as it is a magnet horn, whoever made it, count it the same way. Switching brand does not give you a different rule.

Fitting a capacitor helps buffer it and problems come slower. But it is still better to be careful.

You can count this one today. Go and count how many units you actually have on one channel. More than four, bring it down.

If your machine happens to have the ohm printed on the back, cross check it. Most machines do not, so it is normal not to find it. Do not waste time hunting.

Not sure how yours was wired in the first place? Take a photo and send it over.

Its job is to buffer, so the amplifier lasts longer.

But not every tweeter needs one. It depends which type you are running:

· Coil (magnet) tweeters = this is the type that uses one
· Cheap internal sound tweeters = no need
· External sound, if it is not a coil = also no need

Any tweeter can have one fitted later, so you do not have to decide at the start.

Here is the part fewer people mention, and it is the part that burns your machine: capacitors fail.

Across a whole row of tweeters, the only way to know a few have failed is to test. Use a multi meter or a continuity tester. If it reads below 1 ohm, that will burn the amplifier.

One more thing to be clear about: fitting capacitors does not mean you can run more tweeters. The “no more than 4 units per channel” rule still applies. A capacitor buffers for you. It does not loosen the spec.

Not sure whether your row needs them? Take a photo and send it over and we will look for you.

Not advised, because the two types have different impedance.

Current always takes the easiest path. Mix them and the result is that the sound gets very quiet and the volume becomes very hard to control.

This does not contradict “different distances need different tweeters”. There what changes is the design and the shape (whether it has a bullet head, for example. A bullet head concentrates the sound more), not putting coil and piezo, two different impedances, on the same line.

No, and this is a very common way to fail.

Tweeters differ in reach. Fill the whole entrance with the same type and every unit reaches the same distance, so the stretch in between is blank. A bird flying into that stretch hears nothing, so it just circles outside and does not enter.

So an entrance is not about “the more the better”. It is that different distances need different tweeters covering them. Whichever stretch is broken is the stretch the birds stop at.

To be clear: what changes here is the tweeter's design and shape (whether it has a bullet head, for example. A bullet head concentrates the sound more), which is what changes the reach. It does not mean mixing coil and piezo, which is a different matter.

Which type covers which stretch, how to arrange them, what angle to aim, all of that is walked through and demonstrated one by one in the masterclass. It cannot be covered here. And copying usually goes wrong. Not only copying somebody else. Even your own other house that is doing well, that setup moved over may not suit. Every house has a different layout, bird count and situation. Copying without understanding why it was installed that way is dangerous.

But there is one thing you can check right now. Go and look at your entrance. Is it all one type of tweeter? If it is, you have probably found your problem. Take a photo and send it over and we will look for the gap.

Look at your neighbours first.

If what is around you front, back, left and right is not swiftlet houses, you can install one and it helps.

But if the whole row next to you is swiftlet houses, do not install it. You call the birds down and there is every chance you are calling them down for your neighbours. The moment they come down, they collect them.

Once you have decided to install, the most important thing is getting the position right.

The wrong position is not simply “no effect”. Installed wrong, it can actually keep the birds playing outside instead of going in. You are paying money to keep them at the door.

So the thing to fear most here is copying. Your neighbour installed one so you install one, but the two of you are in opposite situations.

Before installing, send photos of the entrance and the surroundings and we will check whether the position is right.

The focus is on three old problems: sound leaking out the back, sound being muffled, and sound breaking up.

Take the AU8 25P. It actually started out benchmarked against Audax, and along the way a few things ended up better.

What we want is a tweeter that puts out the frequency the birds want, with enough force behind it, not too harsh and not too dull, so the sound does not bounce around the house. All of it was tested and designed in the extreme environment of a swiftlet house, not measured against ordinary audio standards.

Ordinary tweeters use iron at the back, which rusts easily in a swiftlet house, so we switched to copper plate. Where sound leaks out the back, the birds go and nest behind the tweeter, so we thickened the back cover. Small things on their own, but fit out a whole house and the difference shows.

On the tuning side, it is tested and backed by Kiew Meng Kui, the tuning master of the swiftlet industry. Put plainly, the point is for you to waste less money.

We are a swiftlet equipment shop, so different brands and different types of tweeters are sitting there anyway. For the test we ran 8 types at the same time for three months, and the birds nested on the 25P first.

And there is a check you can run yourself without taking our word for it. Go and look at where the nests are. Nests in front of the tweeter means it is a good tweeter. Birds all hiding behind the backside of the tweeter to nest usually means it is leaking sound.

Swiftlets will not do you any favours. Which tweeter is good, they tell you with where they put their nests.

Of course we do.

We just do not recommend putting them at the outer hole. At certain high frequencies and certain volumes, plastic diaphragm tweeters make the sound bounce back, and once the sound bounces the attraction drops a lot.

So this question is not about whether we have them. It is where you put them.

There are many, many ways to keep water out. Buying waterproof tweeters is only one of them, and not necessarily the best.

For example, mount the tweeter inside a bazooka horn, mount it inside a pipe, or move the tweeter position further in so it does not get rained on directly. You can also open a hole under the tweeter so water has somewhere to drain out instead of collecting inside.

Which one to use depends on the actual situation at your entrance. It is not one setup copied everywhere. Take a photo of the entrance, send it over, and we will advise after seeing it.

Put plainly: if you know how to install them, ordinary tweeters last longer than waterproof ones, hold up better, and sound better.

A swiftlet house machine runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. An ordinary amplifier cannot take it. That is the most practical difference.

Besides durability, a dedicated machine comes pre-tuned to the frequencies swiftlets like, so you are not slowly trying things yourself. The PA1100 in particular has a noticeably more solid sound, it sounds better, and it attracts birds more easily.

With the wrong machine, however good your sound file is, it will not come out right. See the products

Depends where you are using it.

3.0 suits internal sound. It is the best sounding internal sound amplifier we have right now.
PRO+ suits external sound. It can control the low, mid and high frequencies of two channels completely independently, one to the outer hole and one to the inner hole, so you can tune the outer and inner separately.

Simply put: good external sound makes the birds more willing to come and play. Good internal sound gets them to settle in faster. Both matter, but which one you should be handling right now, diagnose first.

Here is a comparison that makes it click. The S80 (YanBoss) is more like a traditional petrol car, and the PA1100 series is more like an electric car.

Neither is higher class. They have different temperaments.

If what you want is a softer sound, the S80 actually suits certain positions better. A soft sound works well for the middle section of the internal sound, provided your internal sound is split left and right. Using something softer in the middle makes the whole thing sit more smoothly.

So this comes down to two things: which position you are installing it at, and what kind of force you want. Not which one costs more.

If you are unsure, tell us how your house is set up right now and we will tell you which one goes where.

It does. We have quite a few cases like this. The sound file was not changed at all, only the amplifier was swapped, and within a few months the birds that settled in went up by thirty percent.

The reason is simple. The same song through a poor tweeter and through a good machine are two different things. A bird's ears are far sharper than ours. The distortion and the muddiness we cannot hear, they can.

This is why we often say do not rush to change the sound. What you need to change may not be the song. It may be the sound system.

Swiftpro and YanBoss do, one year. These are our own brands. If it fails, come straight to us. You do not have to take it out for repair yourself.

To be clear, amplifiers mostly do come with a warranty. It is just that for swiftlet house use, very few are willing to give a full year. The environment is harsh and the machine runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Whether it fails is not luck. It is time.

So ask how long the warranty is before you buy. Do not find out months in when the machine acts up. We dare to give a year because we know ours holds up.

Yes. There is a free external sound available now. Message customer service on WhatsApp to get it.

You do not have to buy anything first, and you do not have to do a diagnosis first. Just ask.

But one thing we will say up front: sound is not a cure-all. If your house is stuck at the entrance or the flight path, a new external sound will only make things busy for a few days. The birds come and look, and the ones that were going to leave still leave.

So do one more thing while you are at it. When you collect the sound, send along the three photos (entrance, flight path, nesting planks) plus a recording of the sound inside. Take the sound file and use it, and at the same time we will look at where it is really stuck. Two things done in one go, no need for a second trip.

Get the free external sound on WhatsApp

The full name is Nest Boosting Hormone.

Three components: the scent of the birds themselves, extracted from swiftlet feathers, seaweed extract, and other organic substances. What it releases are the elements swiftlets need to be aroused and to look for a partner, which makes it easier for them to move in and quicker for them to enter the mating period.

There is no guano in it at all, and no ammonia or chemicals of that kind, so there are almost no side effects.

This product has been on the market for over 10 years. It is not new. It is currently the best selling swiftlet hormone in Malaysia, going by sales on the Shopee platform.

It is in use in Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Brunei today.

DSA is built on NBH: 80% NBH plus 20% guano extract.

So the answer here is not “which one is stronger”. It is what your house is missing right now.

A new house, under 100 nests, suits DSA better. There is not much guano smell in there yet, and that extra 20% is exactly what fills that gap.

An old house does not need DSA. An old house already has plenty of its own guano and the smell is there. Adding another layer is redundant. NBH is enough.

Not sure whether yours counts as new or old? Tell us roughly how many nests you have and we will tell you which one to use.

Good question. Swiftlets do carry their own scent, and you can do without aroma. We will not lie to you about that.

Here is a comparison. The food we eat already contains vitamin C, so why do some people still take a supplement?

Because “having it” and “having enough, fast enough” are two different things.

There is only one reason to use NBH: speed. Waiting for the birds to build up the scent on their own takes many years. Build the scent first and you are years ahead of the house next door.

So it is an accelerator, not a necessity. If the fundamentals of the house are wrong, an accelerator only shows you the problem faster.

Most people spray it. It works, we will not deny that. The effect is just short lived. The scent is there right after spraying, then it disperses, and you have to spray again.

The key is whether the scent stays. The longer the scent stays in the house, the better the effect. That is the whole idea behind this product.

We designed our own aroma evaporator. Inside it is an aquarium air pump with a mini fan. It pushes the scent into a container and lets it drift out slowly, so it is always there instead of dispersing after each spray.

Spraying is not wrong. It is just not enough.

This is the more traditional method. It does not last as long as the evaporator above, but plenty of people use it.

We suggest mornings, on a clear day, diluted one part NBH to three parts clean water. Focus on the areas that already have nests, spraying about two feet below the planks, and avoid spraying the planks themselves.

Spraying evenly across the whole house actually works worse, and once the planks get wet they grow mould easily. That is a separate headache, and fixing it costs more than the effort you saved.

If you use it in the morning, you can go and watch from the afternoon into the evening.

What you watch is not the count. It is the behaviour. The flying pattern changes, they get more excited, there is more calling, they chase each other in pairs, and they pull in the birds passing nearby to come and look at your house.

If there is no reaction at all, then the hormone is not the issue. At that point go back and check two things: whether the sound system is right, and whether a predator is interfering. However good the scent is, if there is an owl inside, the birds still will not dare come in.

But one thing has to be kept apart: a reaction does not mean they will stay.

That burst of excitement is short lived. For them to actually settle, the scent has to be extended. It cannot be the short lived kind. That is why we keep talking about making the scent last instead of spraying and calling it done.

Also: the scent works best used together with the rest of the technique and the diagnosis. Whether the entrance flows well, whether the diagnosis was done properly, these go hand in hand with the scent. Get the fundamentals right and the scent has something to push. Get them wrong and the scent just brings birds over for a look.

Ha, a lot of people say they are.

It is easy to see why. What you see every time is one male and one female building a nest together, and if one of them leaves first, all you see is the other one keeping watch at the nest on its own.

But if you pay attention to your CCTV, you will see that they are not.

During the day they mate with whoever. And the urge is strong. Three to five times a day. Mating in the morning, mating at midday, and mating again when they come back in the evening.

They do have one trait though: whoever they mated with during the day, at night they still come home.

As long as they come home.

Normal. Wah, it stinks. Everyone frowns the first time they open it.

But this is the smell swiftlets like. Think about it. Swiftlets like dark places, they like damp environments, and we humans like neither. What a human nose likes and what a swiftlet likes were never the same thing.

So when it is called an aroma, that is aimed at the birds, not at you. To a farmer, this smell is the signal that it is the real thing.

No.

What it extracts is the scent of the birds from swiftlet feathers, plus other organic substances. No ammonia or chemicals of that kind are used at all, so there are almost no side effects.

Nests turning yellow usually comes from something else: the condition of the planks, humidity, or the way you harvest and store. If it happens, send photos and we will help you work out which one.

But there is one thing we must warn you about: never spray hormone onto the nesting planks.

However good the hormone is, on the planks it triggers a whole set of problems. Wet planks are the start of mould, and once the planks are damaged they have to be replaced. A wash does not bring them back.

The scent belongs in the air, not on the planks.

Depends which method you use. We have several, and they differ hugely in how long the product lasts, so there is no universal answer.

Spraying: try to keep each session to around 1 litre, focused on the areas with more nests, no matter how big your house is. Blasting the whole house wastes product and does not make the scent last longer either. Used that way, 4 litres is roughly three to four sessions.

The evaporation methods (water tray, water curtain, bubble machine): how long it lasts depends on your house. The drier the house, the faster it evaporates and the faster it goes. The same bottle can differ a lot between a dry house and a damp one.

So there is no fixed answer to how many bottles a year. It depends on your method, the state of your house right now, and whether you are pushing for growth or maintaining.

Tell us your method and the situation in your house and we will give you a more accurate estimate.

Depends how you use it. Most customers top up once a month.

But that is not a hard rule. A house that is just starting and a house that is already stable run at very different rhythms. When the bird count is climbing and when it has stalled, the approach is different too.

And spraying, water trays, and a bubble machine all hold the scent for different lengths of time, so the top up frequency naturally differs.

Tell us how old your house is and roughly how many nests you have now, and we will give you a rhythm for your house. Better than copying a generic number.

Yes, and for this one the window we give is one month, longer than our other products.

The reason is practical. Scent needs time to work. Three or five days shows you nothing. Giving you three days to decide would not be fair.

And you do not have to send the product back. We refund you directly. What you used is used. There is no need to post an opened bottle back to us.

One condition: this applies to customers who buy one bottle. For the buy three get one free deal, we assume you already know what this product is.

First time using it and not sure whether it suits your house? Buy one bottle and try. That is the room we give new customers.

Not necessarily. We will not give you that guarantee, and anyone who does, be careful with them.

What hormone does is lift the birds' interest. But if they cannot get through the entrance, if the flight path is not smooth, if the planks are mouldy, they come and still will not stay. The scent brings the customer to the door. If the door is broken, they still walk off.

We have seen a house go from 100 birds to 400 in a month, but only because the fundamentals were right first. That is when hormone can help.

No guano smell does not mean the birds feel unsafe. Those two are not the same thing.

Sound, entrance, flight path, light. Get all of those right and the birds come in anyway. Once they come in and a few settle, the guano smell follows on its own. You do not have to manufacture it.

What DSA does is make the guano smell appear faster. It is an accelerator, not a necessity. Without it, with the fundamentals right, the birds still come.

The reverse holds too. With the fundamentals wrong, all the DSA in the world does nothing. If sound, entrance or flight path is stuck on any one of them, you can spray DSA and the birds still will not settle. DSA speeds you up on top of everything being right. It is not there to make up for the fundamentals.

Which raises the question: how do you know whether you got it right?

You do not have to guess. Send photos and a recording of the sound inside and we will look for you.

Not advised.

Scent stacked on scent makes the birds' reaction messy, and worse, you cannot tell which one is doing the work and which one is dragging. Mixing throws all the variables together, and after that there is nothing left to adjust.

If you want to switch brands, switch cleanly and give it a proper stretch of time before reading the reaction.

No. Hormone is the easy door in: low barrier, you can do it today, and it genuinely works. It is not a placebo.

But it is the first step, not the destination. Once you see a few birds, the real work is still finding the root problem in the house.

Honestly, plenty of people in this market sell the easy door and stop there. For us it is the ticket in. Once you see some result and start to get confidence, then we have a way to talk to you about the harder work.

Meranti is the mainstream choice. There is not much argument about that in the market.

The issue is that there is plenty of passing off out there, with other timber used as filler or with grades far below what was promised. Make sure what you buy is real Meranti.

If you are unsure before installing, send photos and ask. Once the planks are nailed up, finding out they are wrong and pulling them down again is expensive.

No need. This may be the opposite of what you expect: those flaws are actually a good thing.

Stand inside the house and look up and you will see why. If the whole ceiling of planks looks identical, a bird has no marker to recognise its own spot.

Knots in the wood, borer holes, the dark dirty patch at the foot of the board, to a swiftlet these are an address. Planks with these usually get nests faster, because they are easy to find.

A lot of people pick out every plank with a blemish until the whole ceiling is spotless and identical. It looks good. It is not friendly to the birds.

More is not better.

Grooves are there to give the birds grip and a position marker. A few are enough. Too many and you are building a home for dust. More lines means more gaps, dust and dirt collect inside, and the planks get darker and darker.

Dark planks, birds do not like them, and you end up spending effort dealing with it. Regular maintenance can prevent that, but do not create that many gaps for yourself in the first place.

How many to add and on which face depends on your plank width and plank spacing, and those are taught together in the masterclass.

Positioning means giving the bird an address.

Inside a swiftlet house the planks are all the same. They all look alike. For a bird to find “the one I live on”, if there is nothing to recognise, it has to spend time feeling around, and after enough of that it may not come back at all.

Give it an easy point to find and it comes easily, and once it comes it likes coming.

Positioning has a second use: separating families. Break the space up so it feels like “I do not see you and you do not see me”, and both sides will take birds. Once two nests sit right next to each other, the young that come back go off to the side, and that is how a flock builds up, bit by bit.

What material to use, how far from the plank to fix it, how to work out the spacing, that is the part with a full method in the masterclass, and it has to be matched to your plank spacing. Copying goes wrong. Even your own other house that is doing well cannot be transplanted directly, because the layout and the bird count are different. What matters is understanding why it is done that way.

And something a lot of people do not know: positioning is not only the one on the plank.

A pair of swiftlets actually remembers two markers: the nest position on the plank, and the patch on the ceiling their bodies rest against. They remember both.

That has an immediate practical consequence: if you only wash the planks and leave those marks on the ceiling, it does not count as cleaned. Plenty of people wash the planks, wait a long time and see nothing happen. This is why.

One more thing we tried ourselves and do not recommend: we tested PE form. It does not work well. Save yourself the time.

There is one thing you can look at yourself first. The spots in your house where nests were built successfully, is there something nearby that happens to be recognisable? Most people take one look and go “oh”.

Yes. That is exactly what my 2012 book said, that planks do not need washing unless they are very dirty, because washing makes them damp and mouldy.

Today I say the opposite: anything that has never been washed needs washing, whether your house is new, five years old or ten.

The reasoning is still correct today. Wash with ordinary water and the planks really do go mouldy. That has not changed.

What changed is the tool, not the reasoning. Today there are products made for nesting planks that handle it without damaging the wood, so the answer moved from “no need to wash” to “anything unwashed needs washing”.

A tree already carries mould on it the moment it is cut down. Nail those planks up and you have brought it into your house.

⚠ One thing to be clear about: “washing” here does not mean climbing up and wiping every plank with a cloth. Whether you need to wipe depends on your house, and that is a separate discussion.

Would you want to live next to a rubbish bin? Neither would a swiftlet.

Dirty and mouldy planks are a direct reason many houses stop growing, and it is one of the few problems you can act on today. No wall breaking, no structural change.

A lot of people keep changing the sound and buying aroma while the planks have never once been washed. That is backwards.

But the line that matters most here is this: by the time you can see the mould spots, it has already started getting serious. Not seeing it does not mean it is not there.

Mould did not grow on the day you noticed it. It grew until it was big enough for you to see. So “deal with it once I see it” is already a step late. Spraying new planks before they go up costs far less than rescuing them afterwards.

The rainy season needs more frequency. Normally every three to six months. In the rainy season, shorten it to about two.

And an expensive misunderstanding: replacing the planks does not necessarily save you.

Planks go mouldy so they get replaced, and a few months later the new ones are mouldy too. We have seen plenty of that. Because mould always has a reason: water collecting below, moisture rising, no air movement in the house at all. Leave those alone and the new planks go the same way. What you replaced was your money, not the problem.

So when you see mould, do not rush to pull planks down. Send photos and we will help you see whether it is a plank problem or an air problem.

You do not have to take our word for it either. Test it yourself: on the same plank, spray one half with clean water and the other half with Meranti+, then go up and look three days later. Swiftlets will not do you any favours, and neither will your planks.

We are the most qualified to answer this one, because MDK's first in-house product was made for the mouldy planks in the founder's father's swiftlet house.

Back then we asked around everywhere and nobody had an answer, so we went looking for anti-mould products ourselves and then found a manufacturer to make a version built for swiftlet houses. Today you know it as Meranti+ Nesting Plank Enhancer.

Spray it, no wiping needed, it prevents mould and removes odour. Clean planks are what let the birds increase. The story is here

Yes. You can skip harvesting, but you must look after your planks.

The planks are the birds' home. A home that is damaged, mouldy or smelly is one nobody wants to live in.

And once planks age past a certain point, a spray will not bring them back. At that stage you are paying to replace them. Maintenance costs far less than replacement.

After more than five years of validation, it handles nearly everything you meet on a nesting plank:

One, prevents mould. New planks can be sprayed too.
Two, treats planks that are already mouldy, spray only, no wiping.
Three, removes odour.
Four, helps the birds with skin problems, and the nests end up looking better as well.
Five, reduces and drives off bird fleas.

Which one are you facing right now? Tell us. In some cases you do not need to buy anything.

One part Meranti+ to 80 parts water.

For example: 200 ml (a fifth of a bottle) to 16 litres of water, or 250 ml (a quarter bottle) to 20 litres.

Use it in the morning on a clear day. It is highly concentrated, one bottle is enough for a whole house, so do not think it looks too thin. Stronger is not better.

A knapsack sprayer is fine, usually the 16 litre type.

One 1 litre bottle of Meranti+ makes 5 tanks of 16 litres.

A real example: a two storey shoplot, 20 feet by 70 feet, spraying every single plank, takes about 3 tanks at a normal pace.

Treat that number as a reference only. Everyone's sprayer puts out a different amount of water, some people spray wetter, some work faster, and the figure shifts.

Planks, nests and chicks can all be sprayed directly without harming them, and that is what sets it apart from ordinary chemical plank washes.

Partitions, walls and the floor can be sprayed too. Stainless steel mesh and the back of tweeters are fine as well, but do not aim at the tweeter diaphragm. That is the one spot to avoid.

There is also a use a lot of people do not know about: spray new corner wood before nailing it up, so the mould problem is blocked in advance instead of dealt with after it appears.

Yes. With or without nests, you can spray. No need to avoid them and no need to wait until after harvest.

Spraying early also gives you prevention. Most people only come to us once the planks are mouldy and smelly, and by then there is a lot more to deal with.

Every four months is our suggestion. Treat it as fixed maintenance, not something you remember once mould appears.

We also suggest another round after harvest. During harvest people are climbing around on the planks, and some spots inevitably get missed or covered. Topping up once is the safer play.

Once diluted there is basically no smell. It will not stop birds coming in and it will not make them move out.

Timing does matter though: finish spraying before 1pm, and before 12pm in East Malaysia.

That has nothing to do with smell. It is so the plank surface dries before the birds come home. Otherwise they land on something cold and wet.

Generally it shows within three days of spraying.

There are a few side benefits customers came back and told us about: fleas are less likely to appear, the birds' feathers look better and shed less, and the nests turn out prettier too.

Clean planks means clean birds living on them. The two are connected.

Depends how bad your black spots are. Honestly, not every kind will go.

The white powdery kind generally disappears on its own. Black spots are not guaranteed.

Something to say up front: this is regular maintenance, not a one spray and done forever. Use it on a schedule and it holds.

So we suggest once every four months as fixed maintenance. What you should be watching is whether the planks stay in a clean state, not whether those few black spots vanish within three days.

Nearly every plank washing chemical on the market requires climbing up and wiping plank by plank with a cloth. Doing that across a whole house is punishing work.

Meranti+ was developed specifically for swiftlet house planks. Spray it on and it breaks down the harmful substances and mould on the plank by itself. You only need to deal with old nest bases and the few spots that are especially bad. Leave the rest to it.

One more thing: not every house needs plank wiping. Whether yours does, tell us the age of the house and roughly how many nests, and we will tell you.

It is safe, and we have lab reports.

It can be sprayed directly on chicks and on nests, which is something many plank washes cannot do.

As for the person spraying: we suggest wearing eye protection, because some people are more sensitive to mist. Not because it is toxic, but because you are spraying above your head in an enclosed space, and you would want to shield your eyes from any liquid in that situation.

You can do both on the same day, but the order cannot be wrong, and pesticide must not go on the planks.

Chalcid, Fendona and that class are high concentration pesticides. Do not spray them on the nesting planks.

The way to do it: spray Meranti+ on the planks first, wait 15 to 20 minutes, then spray pesticide on the walls and the floor.

Why that order: with Meranti+ on the planks, the pests can no longer settle there and will try to escape downward. You are waiting for them below. One pass and it is done.

⚠ This is different from “Where should the pesticide be sprayed?”, do not mix the two up. When spraying planks, the pests flee downward, so the bottom has to catch them. When collecting guano, the pests climb upward, and then the floor is the one you do not spray.

If the infestation is already severe and the planks themselves must be treated, then you need a pesticide suitable for planks, such as Seclira.

Which one can go on planks and which cannot, getting that wrong costs you the whole ceiling of planks. Do not guess. Tell us what pest you have and how bad it is.

We are firmer on this one, because every item here was paid for with years and a lot of planks.

One, stainless steel mesh, plastic mesh, aluminium sheet, straw mats. None of them. They look like they give the birds another surface to grip, but what you actually get is long term trouble, and the birds vote with their feet. They just do not nest on them.

Two, microbial products. There are a few on the market that spray bacteria onto the planks. We tried it ourselves for three years. The residue stays on the plank, and in damp conditions it erupts across the whole surface. The planks turn yellow, the nest bases turn yellow with them, and it attracts borers. Yellow nests with acid levels over the limit hit whether you can sell at all.

Three, some pesticides must never go on planks. Not all of them can. Some leave a chemical smell that will not clear for years. Planks are not floors. You cannot wash it out, you can only replace them. So always check whether a product can go on planks before you spray. Do not just spray something because it kills insects.

A general rule for you: with anything you are adding onto the planks, think through what you will do when it cannot be taken off. Things on planks are easy to add and very expensive to take back.

Neither is advised on planks.

EM is itself a bacteria, and an enzyme. Sprayed on planks it leaves a brown sugar base behind, and over time that becomes the yellow nest base problem.

Wood vinegar does have antibacterial properties, but it is equally unsuitable for planks, because it leaves wood tar residue.

And here is something a lot of people do not factor in: both of them require climbing up and wiping plank by plank. They do not come off on their own.

Planks are not floors. What stays on them cannot be washed out, only replaced. Leave professional work to the people who do it.

Start with a cause most people would not think of: harvesting too fast and too often.

The bird has not laid yet and the nest is already taken away. It has to rebuild, but its saliva cannot be produced fast enough, so it uses more feathers to make up the difference.

So how hairy a nest is sometimes has nothing to do with that bird. It is that you did not give it enough time.

This costs you two things:

One, your own price. More feathers means a lower grade, and it takes more pieces to make up the same kilo, so you get less for it.

Two, the more expensive one: the health of the birds. Pushed like that over the long run, their bodies suffer. With unhealthy birds in the house, nothing after that is easy to discuss.

So the harvest rhythm is not “the more often the better”. Harvest a little slower and the nests come out better looking, the price is better, and the birds stay.

Tell us how hairy your nests are now and how often you harvest, and we will help you see whether you are pushing too hard.

Two sources, and the treatment for each is completely different, so sort that out first.

One, brought in from outside. New birds coming in carry pests on them. The signs are: black spots on freshly built nests, blood on the nests, or old nests feeling lighter when you pick them up.

Two, bred inside the house. Guano piles up and stays damp, pests breed out of the guano and then climb up onto the planks. This is the more common case. Most pests start from the droppings.

Sorting that out tells you where to act: whether to deal with the birds coming in, or with the guano and humidity in your house.

Take a few close up photos of the nests and send them over and we will help you tell which one it is.

Not advised.

At that point the bird has not settled in yet. Those first few nests are made while it is still deciding whether this place can be lived in. Take the nest away and its confidence in that spot is gone.

Let it build three times or more before you start harvesting.

Rushing to take that first batch means harvesting your own birds for the years ahead.

Not necessarily. This is a choice, not a rule.

Most people carry on harvesting.

If you want to protect the chicks of that season, you can choose not to harvest. Whether to hold back is your decision. We will not make it for you.

We cannot just hand you an answer on this one. It has to be diagnosed from your own management, and there may be more than one cause.

Check two things yourself first:

One, when you harvest, do you take every nest you see regardless of whether it has been laid in?
Two, besides the nests being thinner, have the fine feathers increased as well? If they have, look closer: are they spread through the middle of the nest, or only in the base?

If both hold, then in most cases it is harvesting before laying. The bird has to build a new one, its saliva cannot be produced fast enough, and what it builds comes out thin. Keep pushing like that and the nests get thinner and smaller. You will see the cost yourself: it takes more pieces to make up the same kilo, so you get less for it.

If it is not that, then look at the weather. Has it been hotter and drier lately? Are the nests drier? You can feel that when you harvest.

If so, what needs work is airflow management, not your harvesting habit.

One general rule to finish with: do not treat the symptom where it hurts. If the house is too dry, the answer is not necessarily to keep spraying more water into it.

Separate the seasons first. There is one moulting season a year, and hairy nests in that season are normal. No need to panic.

But if it is hairy all year round, that is mostly not moulting. It is itching, and there are bird fleas in the house.

There is a simpler way to read it too, no catching birds and no tools: look at the wings.

Bright wings and a sleek looking body means the house is clean with no pests, and those houses grow faster. The other way around, thin scrappy birds with ragged feathers usually means the house is damp and mouldy, and the nests will be small to match.

A swiftlet's wings are the report card of your house. You do not have to wait until harvest to know how the season went.

Both directions cause trouble, and the birds tell you either way.

Airflow too strong and the swiftlets avoid it very visibly. The way they avoid it is by building nests at the highest positions so the planks shield them. So if you find the nests all crowded at the top, tight against the plank, that is not a coincidence. They are telling you it is too windy there.

The other extreme is no airflow at all, which we call dead flow. With no fresh air, a house grows to a certain number and then stops there and never increases. A lot of people are stuck at that point for years, convinced it is the sound, endlessly changing the sound.

So reading airflow is not about taking an instrument and measuring wind speed. It is about looking at where the nests are built and what number the house stopped at. The birds have already given you the answer. You just have to understand what they are saying.

Not necessarily. Bigger only means more space. What swiftlets want is the right environment.

If that idea held, every swiftlet house converted out of an abandoned mall or an abandoned hotel, and every big standalone house, would have taken off long ago. That is not what happened.

So what about a house that is already built big and performing badly?

If yours is three or four storeys and some floors have very few birds, one very practical suggestion is: concentrate on getting one floor right first, usually the topmost one.

Why. Spread out, renovation, changing tweeters, sweeping guano, spraying pesticide, every floor is another bill. But money is not even the main thing. The main thing is the birds. For one bird to find its partner it has to fly from the third floor down to the first and back again. That is a long trip. Concentrate the birds together and they grow much faster. More friends, faster increase.

Once the birds build up, then you decide whether to work down to the second floor and the first.

Whether your house suits being consolidated this way, tell us the floors and roughly how many birds on each, and we will look at it for you.

Getting one small house right beats getting one big house wrong.

First, how wrong is it.

The worst cases are distortion and bounce back. You walk in and the sound is a total mess, the walls reflect noticeably, or the sound comes out harsh. In all three the birds will not build nests and will not stay.

If it is only tuned imperfectly, the birds still increase, just slowly. So no increase, or a decrease, means there is a problem. It is not bad luck.

How do you spot it? Same as always, look at where the nests are:
· Birds not nesting in front of or near the tweeters = there is a problem
· Birds avoiding the tweeters when they nest = there is a problem
· Birds nesting behind the tweeters = there is a problem

The logic is direct. If the birds are hiding from your tweeter, that tweeter is not attracting them. It is driving them off.

The second read is how they fly, and you can see this on the spot.

A bird genuinely pulled in by the sound flies straight at the tweeter and kisses that spot.

The other way round, watch for these:
· They come at the entrance and veer off, five or six in a row = the sound is pushing them back
· They circle round and round at the entrance = mostly not new birds being attracted. It is your own birds not daring to come home, which is what happens right after you have been inside
· They hover at the entrance flapping without going in = this one is usually not the sound. The entrance is not big enough, or they cannot see the second entrance

And here is something you can do today for nothing: take your phone inside, record, then listen back.

How: stand about 12 feet, 10 feet and 8 feet from the tweeter and record a clip at each, calling out the distance as you record. Then listen to all three. Whether it is messy, whether it breaks up, whether it turns to mush, your own ears can tell. No instrument needed.

That recording is also exactly what we want. Send it over and we will tell you whether it is a coverage problem or a tuning problem.

“A swiftlet house should be dark, the darker the better.” This is one of the biggest misconceptions people hold.

Swiftlets find their position using their eyes and light. They do echolocate, but that function is not strong. They are not bats. Echolocation is only enough to keep them from hitting walls. It is not enough to navigate by.

So this is what happens when the house is too dark. The bird comes in, cannot see clearly, and has to keep emitting echolocation clicks, tick, tick, tick, circling for a long time before it dares go deeper. And after all that circling it may simply not go in, and fly off instead.

But the next sentence matters more. Knowing that too dark is a problem does not mean you should go and open a hole or install lights now. Where you open it, how big, where the light goes, installed wrong is worse than not installing at all.

Whether your house is actually too dark and whether it needs work, send a few photos and we will tell you after we have looked.

Because the point you measure is not the point the birds live at.

A gauge on the wall reads the humidity at the wall. But the nests are up above, and moisture is heavy, it does not travel up there. Up and down are two different numbers. Adjusting based on the number on the wall means adjusting for a place the birds have nothing to do with.

Three more things move the reading: the height of the house, the temperature difference, and the wind speed. Same house, different height, different time, different wind, different number on the gauge.

So we do not play the numbers game. Rather than staring at a gauge you are not sure is hung right, take a few photos: the exhaust pipe, the second entrance, the spot you feel is trapping heat or running too dry. We will look at the actual situation.

First work out where the heat is coming from. Heat comes from all sides, not one direction.

· On the top floor, mainly the roof.
· For a corner unit or a standalone house, the walls come in as well, heat from every side.
· And one a lot of people do not factor in: the airflow itself carries temperature. You think you are ventilating. You are bringing heat in.

But the most important thing is none of the above. It is this: does your house have a design for exhausting hot air and hot wind?

Note, that means physical design, not installing an exhaust fan and calling it done. Without that design, all the insulation you add may not help. Heat gets in and cannot get out, and insulation only slows down how fast it comes in.

How do you know your house is too hot? The most direct sign is nests cracking, and in bad cases dropping to the floor. When you see nests cracking, do not blame the harvesting technique or the quality first. Think about temperature.

Take a few photos: the roof, the exhaust pipe, the ventilation points, the spot you feel traps heat. Send them and we will see whether it is a design problem or an equipment problem.

Two questions first, before asking which model to buy.

One, what environment is your house in? Surroundings that are naturally dry, versus enough moisture that simply does not stay, are two different things with two different fixes.

Two, do your air intake and outlet retain moisture by design? Many houses are not short of humidity. The moisture gets carried straight back out as it comes in. In that case whatever size humidifier you buy is wasted work. The machine runs, the water keeps escaping, and you still pay the electricity.

So the order is: look at the environment and the intake and outlet design first, then decide whether you need equipment. Equipment is the last step, not the first.

This part gets detailed and involves how the whole house's intake and outlet are matched, and we cover it thoroughly in the masterclass. If you want to know which case you fall into right now, send the situation and photos and we will sort you first.

Swiftlets treat it like a buffet. They eat their fill and fly off without even a pause.

Insects bring in “birds that come to eat”, not “birds that come to live”. Getting them to stay depends on the conditions of the house itself.

Yes. My 2012 book says that a steady supply of food in the house raises the chance of swiftlets settling in, and it even said we could design one for you.

Later I raised black soldier flies myself to test it. The birds really did come, in large numbers. But they ate and flew off, and not one of them stayed.

They treated it as a free buffet, finished eating, and left without a pause.

Nobody else came along to disprove me. I took the advice I wrote in that book, tested it myself, and threw it out.

Separate two things first: lighting you switch on while you are inside working, and lights installed in the house for a purpose, are not the same thing.

Purpose built lights have three main uses: deterring predators, attracting insects, attracting birds. The three are installed completely differently. Install for the wrong purpose and the light is on for nothing.

But here is the blunt version: lights have to be installed very carefully. You need to fully understand why you are installing it and at which position. If you cannot think it through, do not install anything.

A wrongly installed light is not merely useless. It can work against you. Swiftlets are very sensitive to light. This is not a “one more lamp can't hurt” situation.

We teach this part in detail in the masterclass. If you are considering installing right now, send the situation and the position and ask first. Better than installing and then needing a rescue.

Of course not. And it is not only the old versus new split. Every person and every house is different.

A new house has to solve being “too new”: no scent, no sense of safety. An old house has to solve ageing: old planks, a structure that has shifted, surroundings that have changed.

But this matters more: even two new houses built side by side and opened on the same day will not be handled the same way.

People have to be taught according to their talent. A swiftlet house has to be built according to its place. Apply one method everywhere and one of them is going to be wrong.

Definitely yes, and definitely no.

Because birds only pick the best house. If your house is good, him building next door does nothing to you. If his house is good, start packing.

That is not meant to scare you. It is meant to put your attention back on what you control. You cannot stop the neighbour from building. What you can do is make yours the one the birds pick.

This is also why we keep saying: it is not that Malaysia has fewer swiftlets. It is that your swiftlets got fewer.

So a neighbour starting to build is really a reminder: go back and check whether your own house is actually done right, instead of sitting there worrying.

Yes, our own brand is called Durian.

To be clear about one thing: this model has actually been selling for several years, over a thousand units, it is just that the market was mainly Vietnam before, so there is not much of a record of it here in Malaysia. To date there has never been a core failure we could not fix, and the bearings are Japanese.

Why did we make our own? Because with third party humidifiers, what always got stuck was the warranty. The customer runs into trouble and only then finds out it is out of coverage, and it was expensive on top of that. Make it ourselves and if it fails you come straight to us. That is our commitment to our own brand.

It is tailor made for swiftlet houses, not an industrial humidifier adapted: a guano guard skirt, a guano guard cover, and a bladeless design so birds do not fly into it by accident, and the floor does not collect damp easily. The airflow is matched to a swiftlet house too. Stronger is not better.

Another one people often ask: why 100W and not 120W? Because the higher the power, the more noise, and it very easily sprays too wet in one go, which brings mould instead. Small amounts often beats a lot at once.

But the same old line applies: humidity being low has many causes, ventilation, structure and surroundings all included. Diagnose first, confirm it is an equipment problem, then buy. Buy equipment that does not match the illness and you still pay the electricity while the problem stays.

Depends whether your house is new or old. The two cases are very different.

A new house matters more. You can use a backup battery wired to the 12V at the back of the amplifier, so at least the sound keeps playing.

An old house does not fear a short outage. Once there are enough birds, they call among themselves and there is sound in the house anyway.

Most people only know “there are fewer birds”. They do not know who is eating them. Wrong direction and all the work is wasted.

The thing is, they leave evidence, and you can see it by looking down:

Snake: the droppings have no foul smell, and they pass out whole strands of swiftlet feathers.
Owl: the droppings are very smelly and very large, with feathers in them as well.

That one difference is enough to tell you where to start looking. For a snake you look for the route it climbed in by. For an owl you look for where it perches. Two completely different jobs.

If you see droppings or feathers you cannot identify, photograph them first. Do not sweep them away. Send them over and we will help you identify them.

Most of the time no. It is usually good news.

Check one thing first: are they scattered, or in piles?

Scattered feathers = a good sign. The birds are starting to mate and prepare to build, and feathers drop during nest building. What you are seeing is them setting up home.

Piles of feathers = very likely rats. That one needs handling, and the method is in “How do I prevent rats?”

To be clear, this is about feathers scattered on the floor, not the feathers inside droppings. Whole strands of swiftlet feathers passed out in droppings means a snake, which is a different matter. See “How do I know which predator is eating my birds?” above.

You can settle this one by walking in and looking down. No tools, no waiting for us. If you cannot tell scattered from piled, take a photo and send it over.

Owls are a swiftlet house's great enemy. One gets in and the whole house is unsettled. But this one is actually simple. People just overcomplicate it.

The key is here: the owl is afraid too, especially the first time. Its first visit is a test.

So there is only one thing you need to do: do not let it perch at the entrance the first time. If it manages to perch the first time, it knows this place is available. If it cannot, it mostly will not come back.

The point is not how to chase it off. It is not letting it have one successful first experience. Waiting until it is a regular before you look for a solution makes it hard.

If it is already coming every couple of days, then you need to see where it gets in and where it stops. Send photos (or CCTV footage) of the entrance and the spots it appears at, and we will know where to act after seeing them.

Same logic as the owl: find where it perches first, do not chase it around.

This kind of bird does not charge straight in. It perches at a high point where it can see the whole scene, watches, and only acts once it is sure it is safe.

So the order is: take away its favourite high point first, force it back to its second choice, then wait for it there. Pushing it step by step into a spot you chose beats waving your arms outside the house.

Where the high point is, and where the second point will be, differs for every house. It depends on your building type and the surroundings. The masterclass has the full method.

Once it is handled there is a check you can see for yourself: in about two weeks the birds come back. If they do not, the problem is more than just the eagle.

First, how serious it is: one snake that gets in can eat several hundred birds. That is not an exaggeration. It has happened.

And a lot of people miss the route it comes in by: the electrical wiring. Snakes climb into the house along the wires, and however tightly you shut doors and windows it makes no difference. Rats use the same route, so blocking it handles both problems at once.

One more key point: snakes use fixed routes. Two of them are often caught at the same spot one after another. So do not search the whole house at random. Find the route it uses and treat that corner.

How do you tell it was a snake? Look at the droppings: no foul smell, and whole strands of swiftlet feathers passed out.

Once you find it, photograph it and send it over, especially the point where the wiring enters the house. If there is already a snake inside, do not make any big moves yet. Getting the order wrong will scare off the birds you still have.

First, the thing everybody gets wrong: catching them and releasing them far away does not work. They come back, or others keep coming.

What works is the opposite: let the live one be seen by the others. Pigeons pass information among themselves, and after the flock has seen it a few times the whole flock stops coming near your house.

This is really the same principle as the owl: what you are dealing with is not this one bird. It is their impression of your house. Chase one away and the next one comes anyway. Make them feel this place is not to be visited, and it is solved once.

Exactly how to do it and where to place it depends on your entrance and where they perch. It is covered in the masterclass.

Photograph where they perch and send it over first, and we will see whether the entrance itself is too easy to perch on.

They do, and there are two kinds, very different in severity.

One, fruit eating bats. Yellow on the belly, they habitually hang at fixed spots. They mainly take up space and make a mess, and they are relatively easy to handle because they hang in the same place every day.

Two, the kind that eats swiftlets. That one is the worst. It does not hang at a fixed spot and it is hard to find. We saw one house where it took two years to catch two of them, and in that time four hundred birds were eaten.

Why so hard? Because you cannot see it. You only see the birds steadily dropping. Many owners spend those years suspecting the sound, suspecting temperature and humidity, checking for two years and never finding it, while the real cause has been inside the house the whole time.

So whenever your birds are decreasing and you cannot find the cause, predators must be checked. Do not only check the equipment. Catching this kind of bat takes a specific method. Hanging a net is not enough. The masterclass has real cases of them being caught.

First, a principle: putting out poison is treating the illness. Prevention is the point. By the time you are putting poison inside the house, the rats are already in, and you are dealing with the consequence.

Prevention means two things:
One, put rat boxes outside the house, so they are handled before they get in.
Two, block every possible entry point: drains, toilets, ventilation openings, door gaps, and the point where the wiring enters the house. Those are the ones most often missed, because everybody only watches the doors and windows. A rat does not need a big hole. A gap is enough.

What if they are already inside? Rats follow fixed routes. Bait and small traps only work in the right positions. Placed randomly, you are feeding them.

Photograph the spots where you see droppings or gnaw marks and we will tell you where to start.

They do. Geckos steal eggs and climb the planks, and the birds get unsettled.

But there are two kinds and the methods are opposite:

Small geckos, use the light lure method. A bulb draws small insects, the insects draw the geckos over, and the moment a gecko gets close it touches the high voltage and it is done. You do not have to chase them around the house. Letting them come to you is far less work.

You can also use bait. Place it where the geckos regularly pass, top up the water mix regularly so it does not dry out, and the geckos will go over and eat it.

Monitor lizards cannot be lured. You have to fence off the entire wall so they cannot climb up. What they want is the whole building, not one corner, so what you block has to be the whole face, not one point.

Photograph any traces you see and send them to us. Work out which kind it is first, then decide what to do, otherwise the effort goes in the wrong direction.

They affect the grade and the price. But honestly, that is still the small stuff.

What is truly serious: chicks get bitten by ants and whole nests are lost. The birds gradually decrease and eventually the whole house leaves. What you lose is not the price of that batch of nests. It is the birds of the entire house.

How to handle ants: besides spraying, gel type ant baits work very well. Placed in the right position it beats spraying everywhere.

If cockroaches are already on the planks in numbers, then you need a pesticide that can be sprayed on planks. Note, not every pesticide can go on planks. You must check this. Spray the wrong one and both the planks and the birds have a problem.

Like fleas, this is not something you do after trouble starts. It is regular work. By the time you see chicks being harmed, you have already missed a lot of chances.

Fleas do not come from a single cause. Several things have to be done together. Skip one and they come back.

One, the condition of the planks. Dirty, mouldy planks make it easy for fleas to build up. Customers have come back and told us that after using Meranti+ the fleas are less likely to appear and the birds' feathers look better and shed less.
Two, control the moisture. Too damp and fleas have somewhere to live.
Three, clear the guano regularly. Guano piling up is a home you left for them.
Four, spray pesticide. This one cannot be skipped. Do not assume that clean planks and cleared guano mean you can skip spraying. They are separate things. What needs spraying still needs spraying.

Do all four together and treat it as fixed routine work, not something you do after trouble starts. Do only one or two and after a while you will find them back, and you will assume the product did not work.

Yes. We have tested it. Seclira SG kills spiders and their eggs.

Fleas, beetles, cockroaches, flies and mites are handled along with them. Same usage, spray it in the corners of the nesting planks or wherever the spiders appear.

It comes as granules. Mix with clean water and apply with a knapsack sprayer. The bottle cap is the measuring cup, so you do not need to find another tool.

The dose is worked out from your sprayer capacity. We go through it with you once when you buy, and following that you will not get the mix wrong.

It depends on whether you have collected the guano yet. The method differs between the two cases. A lot of people mix this up and spray in the wrong place entirely.

One, guano already cleared.
Spray the band of wall just below the nesting planks. Do not spray the floor.
The reasoning is simple. With the guano removed, the pests that lived in it have nowhere to stay and will climb up towards the planks to find the birds. Spraying the floor is spraying for pests that have already left. That band of wall is the route they must take.

Two, guano not yet cleared.
Do the reverse: spray the damp guano piles and the walls first, leave it a week, then collect the guano. That deals with them while they are still in the guano, instead of waiting for them to climb up.

One small extra trick: when sweeping guano, leave a few small piles behind and spray those piles. Cockroaches go to eat guano, so you have set an ambush for them.

Get the order right and the same tank of pesticide performs very differently.

⚠ This entry is about collecting guano, where the pests move upward. If you have just sprayed Meranti+, the pests flee downward, and then it is the bottom that has to catch them. See “Can I spray it together with pesticide?” for that.

It depends on how serious the pest problem is, not on a fixed schedule.

One thing you must do: alternate with Fendona every so often. Stay on the same product and the pests build resistance, and eventually spraying gets no reaction at all.

First, a cost most people never work out: the stolen nests are the small loss. What is truly expensive is the birds leaving.

A thief does not treat them the way you would. He goes in, turns on the lights, climbs the planks and works fast, and in one visit he can startle the adult birds of the whole house into abandoning their nests. What you lose is not that one trip's nests. It is several years of production after it.

So there is one principle worth keeping in mind: the fewer people who know what is in your house and when you harvest, the better.

This is not about suspecting anyone. It is that this industry has seen too much of it, and once the routine of a house is known, the risk is there.

If you genuinely need someone to go in and look, be there yourself. After they look, have them account for what they saw and what they recommend moving. Someone who can be accountable for the result will not mind you standing next to them.

One more thing well worth doing: install an IP camera.

Its value is not in reviewing footage afterwards. It is in knowing before anything happens. Before the thief has knocked, your phone has already told you somebody is there.

Most swiftlet houses are somewhere you cannot see, and going once a week counts as diligent. With one camera, you are there all seven days.

Technique always matters more than location. With technique you will not die anywhere. Without it, you lose money even in the best spot.

But one thing is different from a dozen years ago and it needs saying: the price is not the same. That “build it and wait for the harvest” arithmetic does not add up today. What this business earns now is production and cost control, not waiting for the price to climb.

So the order is always learn first, invest after. Once the house is built, the wall positions, the entrance height and the length of the flight path are fixed. Changing them later costs more in demolition than you saved at the start. Start with the free sharing session

Something you may not want to hear first: people who keep agonising over this question usually have no birds in their house.

With no nests inside, the market and the price have nothing to do with you. That is somebody else's business.

So the real question here is not “is it still worth doing”. It is “why are the few nests in my house not increasing”. That other question comes after this one.

What follows is for people who already have nests and are thinking long term.

Prices have risen and fallen more times than anyone can count. Anyone who has been in this long has seen the highs and the lows. If you decide whether to keep going based only on the price at this moment, you will be led around by the market forever.

Something worth thinking through: edible birds nest is scarce.

It is not like durian fruit. Plant a durian tree, look after it, and it fruits when the time comes. Swiftlets are wild. You cannot plant them and you cannot raise them. All you can do is make them willing to come. So this business has never been “put money in and get production out”. That is where the scarcity comes from.

So what is the pattern? The returns start around the time most people give up.

But there is a trap in that: getting to a good harvest takes time by nature. A swiftlet house matures in months and years, not days.

So if you wait until everyone else is harvesting before you start, you are already late. You are still finding your feet while they are years ahead.

We do not forecast prices and we do not talk about bright prospects. The only thing worth saying is: you cannot control the price. What you can control is whether you got the house right during this stretch. Get it right and you are in the room when the market turns. Get it wrong and a good market is just something you watch.

Both, but only one of them you can move.

Grading at purchase looks at three things: how many feathers, how dirty, and whether it is broken up. And those three, traced back into the house, are a few very concrete pieces of work: the condition of the planks, whether pests are under control, and whether the house is clean. Those are not market conditions. They are management.

In the same market on the same day, the cleanest band and the dirtiest band are far apart in price. That gap was not given by the market. It was made inside the house.

What the market pays, you cannot change. Which band you land in, you can.

It is not that Malaysia has fewer swiftlets. It is that your swiftlets got fewer.

That is a harsh line, but it is actually good news, because whether the birds come is mostly in your hands.

You can test it yourself. Go and look at the houses near you, especially the ones built after yours. Are they increasing? If the neighbours are increasing, then the problem is not the wider environment and not the area. It is your house.

Birds only pick the best house. Turn that around and it means if you make yours the best one, they come back.

Most can. We have seen more than one old house with three or four years of no growth start growing again once the right problem was found.

Old houses often have better fundamentals than new ones. What they lack is a diagnosis. And an old house has something a new one does not: a record. Which year the drop started, what you changed before it, what the neighbours did in those years, whether the planks were ever replaced. With a new house you can only infer. With an old house all of that is evidence.

So an old house is not a burden. It comes with more data.

A swiftlet house matures in months and years, not days. Anyone guaranteeing you a payback in a few months, be careful with them.

And asking “how long to break even” today does not compute as neatly as it did a dozen years ago, because the price side has changed (covered above).

The more useful questions are these two: where is this house stuck right now, and which single move next gives the best return? Answer those two and the payback time can actually be worked out. What we can do is help you get every step right, so you waste neither money nor time.

Getting from zero to a thousand takes a lot of time. Getting from a thousand back to zero is fast.

So the expensive part has never been the equipment. It is the time spent waiting. Wrong direction, and no amount of waiting helps, and you will assume you are merely “not there yet”.

This is also why we insist on diagnosing first. A diagnosis costs you days. The wrong direction costs you years.

We get this almost every week, and the people asking are usually very tired.

When someone asks this, it is normally because the last few things they spent on showed nothing. Spend more and you fear wasting it again. Do not spend, and you fear the house just stops here.

So our answer is not “spend more” or “do not spend”. It is stop and have it looked at once. After that it may turn out you should spend, or that you do not need to.

The diagnosis costs nothing, and sometimes the prescription is “do not buy anything yet”. What you are short of right now is not one more product. It is knowing where the next payment should go.

You do. If you do not understand it, whatever the manager tells you is all you have to go on.

A lot of people have a misconception that more equipment is better. Take tweeters. They see swiftlets like nesting in front of the tweeters, so they keep adding more. Added far enough, it can actually leave the birds disoriented, because it is too chaotic.

So what matters is understanding the reasoning behind it. Once you understand it yourself, you know what your manager is doing, which means you can supervise properly, and if you ever have to take over yourself you will not be scrambling.

Nobody cares about your own investment more than you do. Owners who understand their own house mostly get better results.

We will not give you a “results in a few days” guarantee, and you should be careful with anyone who guarantees you a timeline, because a swiftlet house matures in months and years.

But there is one thing we can say out loud: follow it through completely, tune it right, and there is an effect. That is not luck. That is how this method works. We have seen too many houses, and the difference between the ones that worked and the ones that did not is whether they actually followed it through.

So the variable is not the method. It is whether you finish it. You photograph, you change, you update, we confirm and fine tune. Once that loop is turning, results come. Half done, half changed, asked and never acted on, and nobody can help.

What we can deliver is: a serious diagnosis, a prescription that fits the illness, and telling you plainly when you do not need to buy anything. The other half is in your hands.

People who ask this have usually been holding on a long time, so we will answer you seriously.

When a swiftlet house does not take off, most of the time it is not the person. It is one obstacle in that house that has never been found. Houses with three or four years of no growth at all that started growing again once the right problem was found, we have seen. People who changed the sound three times and bought a pile of equipment when all that needed moving was one wall, we have seen that too.

You are tired because you have been making decisions without answers the whole time. That kind of tired is not you failing. It is that nobody has ever diagnosed your house down to the root.

So before you decide to give up, at least let someone look at it properly once. Three photos and one sound recording. It costs nothing.

Genuinely free. Not a cent, and you do not have to buy anything first.

2 hours, walking you through the thinking behind the MDK Swiftlet House Diagnosis Method: why the entrance comes first, why changing the sound mostly does nothing, and which few things you can go home and check yourself. You can join online.

Will there be a sales pitch along the way? We will talk about what we do, but we will not ask you to sign anything in the room. If it does not sound right to you after listening, just walk. Register for the sharing session

The depth is different, and so is what you walk out holding.

The sharing session is a free 2 hours on the thinking: why diagnose first, why the order cannot be scrambled. After it you will know roughly which direction to look at your own house from.

The full course is two days offline plus one day of site visit, running from swiftlet house positioning all the way to a complete SOP. On the third day you go straight into a swiftlet house with the instructor guiding inside.

One sentence: the sharing session settles “should I change how I see this”. The course settles “which things do I go home and move”.

We suggest the sharing session first. If it does not suit you, you have saved yourself the money and the time.

Two days of offline class plus one day of site visit.

Two days in the classroom cover the system and the method. The third day goes straight into a swiftlet house. Explaining entrance angles on paper a hundred times is worth less than standing under one entrance once, which is why students most often say that day gave them the most.

A class runs roughly 50 to 70 people. Refreshments are provided on site. Lunch and accommodation are not included, you arrange those yourself.

For overseas students we arrange it online, so you can attend even if you cannot travel.

The full course is split into thirteen units, ordered the way a swiftlet house works from outside in, from getting the birds in to getting them to stay:

Swiftlet house positioning and four season diagnosis → exterior, insulation and site selection → entrance design → internal layout → light → external sound tweeters → interior design and nesting planks → internal sound tweeters → tuning → ventilation → humidity control → daily management (plank ageing, predators, pests, guano clearing, hormone, harvesting, blacklist houses) → and finally the complete SOP.

It is not a pile of knowledge points handed to you. It builds the order. Most people are not unfamiliar with these terms. They do not know which one to move first.

The course also keeps getting updated with the latest situations, so every intake has new information in it.

The course page has the main outline

Yes. The course includes going to an actual swiftlet house with the instructor guiding and explaining inside.

Explaining entrance angles on paper a hundred times is worth less than standing under one entrance once.

That day is not sightseeing. You see how a real house gets read layer by layer, and that gives you something to compare your own against when you get back.

Yes, and this is the most worthwhile timing.

People planning to invest in a house, people managing houses for others, and people taking over their parents' house all suit coming to listen first.

Why is it worthwhile? Because once the house is built, the wall positions, the entrance height and the length of the flight path are fixed. Changing those later costs more in demolition than you saved. Choosing the site and reading the layout are exactly the things you should understand before spending the big money.

Understand first, buy after, fewer detours.

Depends what state your house is in now.

If it has been growing these past few years, you already have an approach that works. Coming to the sharing session to see what could be topped up is enough.

If you have been stuck for years, then honestly, experience is sometimes baggage. The most common situation with people who have been at it for over ten years is: they have done everything that should be done, but in reverse order. Adjust temperature and humidity first, change the sound first, add tweeters first, and the entrance has never once been looked at seriously.

So being stuck makes it worth coming once. Not to learn new tricks. To get the order right once.

Arranged online, so you can attend even if you cannot travel.

The course content runs the same way. For the site visit day we make separate arrangements for online students.

If you want to come in person, WhatsApp us first with where you are and when suits you, and we will schedule it.

If merely attending a class changed things, that would be magic 😆

What the class gives you is judgement. Back home you can see where the problem is yourself, and that is what actually learning it means.

Honestly: in the same class, the difference between students who go home and act and those who do not is huge. The method is not the variable. Whether you follow it through is.

So we would rather you go home after the class and do one small thing properly than put the whole notebook in a drawer.

There is. But let us be clear about how it works so there is no misunderstanding.

You go home, you make a change, you send photos, and we will catch it every time. Whatever needs fine tuning we will tell you, and whatever needs waiting we will tell you to wait. Do not stand on ceremony, and there is no extra charge for it.

But we will not chase you. If you say nothing, we are not going to keep asking whether you have done it.

Why set it that way? Because the house is yours and so is the pace. Some people act the day after the course, some wait for the next season. Both are right. What we can do is be there the moment you speak up, not decide for you when to speak.

Put plainly: the loop turns because you send that first photo. Students who come and update on their own do get more out of it, and that is something we have watched for years.

We do not quote the price on the web page. WhatsApp us directly and we will tell you straight, along with when the next intake is.

Why not put it up? Because all you would see is a number with nothing to compare it against. Come to the free 2 hour sharing session first, judge for yourself whether this approach suits your path, and then asking about price actually means something.

We do not want to take money from someone who signed up before they understood the situation.

Yes, but it has to be arranged separately.

It is not a box you tick at registration. We have to walk the paperwork through first. So if you are planning on it, say so before you register. Do not raise it after the course has finished. By then it is too late.

One more thing up front: going the HRDC route comes with some additional handling fees. We will tell you honestly how much, and you work out whether it is worth it.

WhatsApp us that you want to use HRDC and we will tell you what your company needs to prepare.

After the first day, if you feel it was not worth it, you can have a refund.

Why do we ask you to finish the first day? Because the first few hours are spent taking apart what you already believe, and that process is uncomfortable by nature. Only after a full day can you judge whether this approach suits your path.

We do not want to take money from someone sitting there feeling cheated.

MDK Swiftlet Sdn Bhd, 110, Jalan Melati 1/3A, Bandar Amanjaya, 08000 Sungai Petani, Kedah.

Around Amanjaya, near the northbound highway toll at Sungai Petani. Map and contact details

WhatsApp us what you want and where to send it. That is enough.

If you are not sure what to buy, send photos of your house first. Deciding after the diagnosis wastes less money.

Absolutely. The diagnosis is free anyway, and sometimes the prescription is “do not buy anything yet”.

We would rather you not buy this time and come back once you have results.

We do, but we have to be honest: our follow up is not good enough. We do not manage to chase every customer.

So we say it up front. If you update us, we will always catch it. If you say nothing, we may miss you.

We do not do on site installation, not even within Malaysia, so it is not that overseas customers are missing out on a service.

But we do give remote guidance. If something is unclear while installing, take a photo or a short video and send it over, and we will follow along with you.

Swiftpro and YanBoss amplifiers carry a one year warranty, and for the swiftlet house environment, not many are willing to give a full year. For tweeters, quality problems such as a short circuit or the sound going quiet can be returned.

To send one in for repair, post it back to us. Postage both ways is on the customer.

We will not tell you to take it out and find someone to repair it. A swiftlet house machine is not ordinary audio, and someone outside may not know how it runs day to day. Post it back, we handle it ourselves, and we post it back to you once it is fixed.

No.

Kuching, Sri Aman, Sibu and Miri all have our dealers. Usually the nearest one has stock.

If a dealer happens to be out of stock, we send it from here. Air freight or sea freight, your choice, and it does not drag on. If it is urgent, tell us and we will arrange it around the timing you need.

Depends what you want. Not everything ships equally well.

Liquids and DG (dangerous goods) are the most troublesome. Hormone, treatment solutions and that category get held up at customs by nature, and shipping them out easily runs into obstacles.

For everything else, we can arrange it from here.

And one route a lot of people do not know about: some products already have a dealer selling them where you are, and picking them up locally is actually faster.

So tell us what you want first, and we will see whether it is better to ship from here or to send you to the local dealer.

You can, but the window differs by product. Let us set it out clearly so nobody ends up unhappy.

NBH hormone: one month.
Scent needs time to work. Three or five days shows you nothing, so for this one we give a full month. And you do not have to send it back. We refund you directly.
One condition: this applies to customers who buy one bottle. For the buy three get one free deal, we assume you already know what this product is.

Machines such as amplifiers: three days.
Why so short? Because once the box is opened and it has been installed, picked up dust or got the casing scratched, it can no longer be sold as new.
So if you install it and the sound is not what you wanted, bring it back straight away, provided it does not affect resale.

Other products that do not scratch easily: within a week.

The course: after the first day, if you feel it was not worth it, you can have a refund. Why the first day is explained in the “Swiftlet Signature Masterclass” section above.

Quality problems are a separate matter. Tweeters with a short circuit, sound going quiet and the like are not bound by the windows above. Straight replacement, no discussion needed.

If you have doubts, ask before you buy. We would rather answer you a few more times than have you spend money on something that sits there unused.