Dealing with an outbreak of fleas or other pests in your home can be a challenge. Fortunately, professional carpet cleaning can make it easier to purify your carpets and manage pest outbreaks to help your home stay safe and clean. But is professional carpet cleaning actually effective at eliminating pests from your carpet and soft furnishings once and for all? And can pests survive the carpet cleaning process and re-infect your home? Here we look at the effect of professional carpet cleaning on fleas and pests and how you can make use of professional floor cleaning services to keep your home sanitary.
Flea and Pest Invasions
Fleas and other pests like clothes moths, carpet beetles, cockroaches and silverfish can easily gain access to your home and set up residence. Our pets, second-hand clothing or furniture, and food products are the common sources of these pests; they may also just walk or fly into your home. Getting rid of a pest invasion is often a homeowner’s first priority. Carpeting can house many pests and fleas as they love to live in the dense fibers, waiting for someone to crawl or walk by to get their next blood meal. Pest exterminators can provide the best advice on terms of analyzing and assessing your pest issues and particularly the level of invasion in your carpets. Exterminators can also provide a powerful and effective solution to kill pests and their eggs.
However, some homeowners wish to prevent using harsh chemicals and treatments to kill pests, as these can be toxic to pets and children. Carpet steam cleaning and other natural treatments are often turned to as a lower chemical solution to control pests and limit their spread.
Is Carpet Cleaning Effective for Pests?
The answer is yes, but only for adult or dead pests and their droppings.
Professional carpet cleaning should be an essential part of removing fleas and other pests from your home. Professional carpet cleaning and upholstery cleaning helps to lift adult fleas, bugs, and some of their eggs from carpet and upholstery fibers and removes dead pests and their droppings. This helps to make your carpet look, smell, and feel better as well as making the carpet and soft furnishings more hygienic.
So while carpet and upholstery cleaning is effective for adult bugs, this process is not as effective for the eggs and the young larvae of fleas and other pests. Carpet cleaning can exterminate mature pests and lift them out of the carpet, but young larvae and eggs are so tiny that it can be hard to get them all. Just one egg can hatch into an adult that lays another 50 eggs per day, so all eggs need to be killed or removed to eliminate the problem. In most cases of pest infestation, chemical treatment and pest extermination may be necessary to ensure pests have no chance of repopulating your carpets. Unfortunately, this means some chemicals do need to be used to eliminate pests completely. However, once carpets have been treated for pests, carpet cleaning can be the ideal follow up treatment to remove all traces of the pests and the leftover chemicals.
A More Natural Solution
Depending on the type of pests in your home, steam cleaning of your carpets can be a reasonable solution to manage and control pests with minimal use of chemicals. Hot carpet cleaning treatments can eliminate adult pests, and these treatments can be sequentially followed up weeks later to get the eggs once they’ve hatched. This method may not be as effective as chemical treatments, so it’s important to discuss your needs with a pest control agency. You may also need to ascertain whether your carpet is right for this treatment with your local carpet cleaning company.
