Kevin Carrillo
Pest Control Specialist, MMPC
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Forum Comments (9)
Carpenter ants are drawn to untreated, unpainted, RAW wooden areas of your home, to damp areas, or if there's dead wood or rotting wood on the property. Take care of firewood stacks, cover or remove old stumps, make sure wood is painted or stained, replace damaged siding, etc.
Getting rid of carpenter ants is going to require professional intervention once you've got them because of their ability to create not only structural damage, but to infest the structural areas of your home you don't necessarily have access to.
If the issue is low-level enough, you may be able to take care of the issue with store-bought carpenter ant bait, but this is not recommended if you're a homeowner - protect your investment!
1. Get your pets on medication as prescribed and approved by a veterinarian.
2. Weekly flea baths.
3. At LEAST 3x daily flea combing - be prepared to remove fleas as you're combing and have somewhere to put them.
4. Anywhere in your home that there is shade is a hangout, so vacuum it regularly and be prepared to clean out the vacuum with rubbing alcohol.
5. Get yourself a bulk order of lint rollers. Run lint rollers REGULARLY over anywhere your pet rests - you will probably pick up both fleas and their larvae.
6. Steam clean your carpets - even low-pile carpets are thicker than you think, and fleas can hide out deep in the weave.
7. If you have an outdoor pet, try as much as you can to cut back and eliminate foliage that creates shaded areas. If you can't, do your best to restrict pet access to these areas.
1. Launder EVERYTHING.
2. Deep clean EVERY place that clothing was kept.
3. Regularly steam clean anything upholstered and carpeting.
4. Change out felt carpet padding for synthetic when possible.
5. Just because traps aren't catching doesn't mean you should stop using them. Keep one in each room and one in each closet, in dark, out-of-the-way areas. Change them every 3-6 months (by label) until they're clear for 3 years.
6. Keep as much of your freshly cleaned and not-worn-everyday clothing in storage bins and garment bags as you can.
7. Think outside the box. Caterpillars feed on a protein called keratin, found in our hair and fingernails (same for animals). Anything you have that contains this protein is a suspect: food source, silk, wool, felt, your pool table, an antique horse-hair stuffed couch, etc.
Searching throughout basically the entire home and wherever you're able to find bedbugs, you can simply remove them either by vacuuming and disposing of the vacuum bag, or killing them with Isopropyl rubbing alcohol or something that's at least 80% alcohol. Rubbing alcohol, physical removal, vacuuming, and cleaning the vacuum will treat the issue but the main thing is diligence and perseverance—as long as you are actively searching for the bedbugs, the bedbugs themselves, once you find them, are pretty easily killed. It's totally fixable on your own, but most people start to lose heart once they've done all of their laundries and gone through all of their books, and then they're still getting bitten and they just haven't thought to look in all of the areas that the bedbugs can be hiding.
Whenever you're able to find bedbugs, you can simply remove them either by vacuuming and disposing of a vacuum bag. You can use Isopropyl rubbing alcohol with at least 80% concentration. Steam is also hot enough to kill bedbugs if you apply it directly to the area for a couple of seconds.
There are a couple of different types of "bedbug traps" on the market that emit CO2, which is what we breathe out all day long, and there's also usually a backup bed bug pheromone. You open the trap and put it in a box and ideally, a bed bugs will get trapped. Just make sure you're not in the room at the same time, or else the bed bugs may be attracted to you instead.
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