How to Get Rid of Fleas from Your Carpet
While it may be extremely difficult to successfully vacuum away the flea infestation in your house, it is not impossible. In order to do so, there are just a few precautionary steps that you will need to take.
1. Before you go straight for the vacuum, consider where the fleas in your home are likely to find themselves. Fleas, after all, are a pest that can jump from surface to surface rather easily. That’s why you need to take care of all the surfaces that the fleas may have spread in order to eliminate them properly. Otherwise, you’ll spend a lot of time trying to vacuum them out of your carpet, only to have them come back and infest your carpet again.
Believe it or not, the carpet of your home is where the majority of the flea population will live. Your carpet is often home to all the flea eggs, larvae, and pupae. Statistically, flea eggs account for 50% of a flea infestation, and 45% of the infestation is represented by the flea larvae and pupae. This means that 95% of the total flea infestation in your home lives in your carpet, and it’s a strong reason to consider vacuuming as a major way to get rid of fleas.
By vacuuming your carpet to get rid of fleas, you’ll be striking the flea population where it is the weakest, with the young pest offspring. On average, a single female flea can produce 50 eggs per day, and she does so only 36 to 48 hours after mating. That’s just one female flea, and because of this, they multiply extremely quickly.
Vacuuming fleas out of your carpet not only gets rid of all the adult and mobile fleas, but it also gets rid of the next generation of fleas and all the debris and garbage that comes with them. For example, fleas have blood feces that look like ground black pepper, and if they’re in your carpet, you can bet that your carpet is full of that stuff. This is due to the fact that the flea larvae thrive off of that stuff, Vacuuming sucks up this dirty food supply, which will help starve out whatever flea larvae didn’t get picked up by the vacuum.
When It comes to flea pupae, they are the hardest to kill and remove. That is because they form a cocoon tightly spun on the base of the carpet fibers, and hide in them. This cocoon is resistant to insecticides and so well woven to your carpet fibers that it’s extremely difficult to remove. Luckily, the vacuum makes vibrations in the carpet that usually cause the larvae to leave their cocoon, making them vulnerable to being sucked up.
We don’t recommend using chemicals and pesticides or other flea mediations to remove fleas from your carpeted floors. This is because applying these chemicals will definitely kill of all of the adult fleas and may decimate a large portion of your flea population, in terms of flea eggs and larvae. However, pupae are likely to survive such an attempt, thanks to its resistant cocoon. Because of this, using pesticides or other chemicals would solve the problem in the short run, but it would only be a matter of time before the pupae grew up to become the next generation of your flea infestation.
If you must do more than simply vacuum, the safest and most guaranteed way to get rid of an infestation is to steam them out. Again, it only takes temperatures of 95 degrees Fahrenheit and higher to kill all fleas, and it doesn’t leave any toxic chemical residue in your home afterward.
Final Thoughts
The truth is, vacuuming is the best way to get rid of fleas, even though it might be a bit of work to pull it off. Vacuuming gets rid of every generation of those pests, and it does it without the use of dangerous or questionable chemicals or complicated philosophies.
- 24 Mar, 2022