What to Sort Out Before the Visit
Two things are worth doing before anybody comes, and neither takes long. The first is to work out which rooms are actually involved, rather than booking the whole house because the bites are annoying. The second is to make the floors reachable: lift the shoes, toys, baskets and storage boxes off them, pull the beds out from the wall where you can, and take up the small rugs you are washing but leave the rest where they are, since carrying a rug through the house takes the problem with it. Preparing a property for flea treatment has the full checklist.
It is also worth being sure the bites are what you think they are, because the preparation is wasted otherwise. Flea bites are small, very itchy and almost always below the knee — whoever spends the evening with their feet on the rug gets the worst of it. Bites that turn up overnight across the arms, neck and shoulders fit bed bugs far better, and itchy skin alongside tiny bristly larvae at a carpet edge points to carpet beetles instead. How to know if you have fleas at home lists the checks, and a pharmacist or GP can advise on any bite that looks infected.
How Rooms Are Counted in a Sudbury Family House
A room counts when it has carpet, rugs or upholstered furniture in it, or when a pet sleeps there. In a typical house of this type that usually means the lounge, the dining room if it has not been knocked through, and the bedrooms in use. Halls, landings and stairs are never counted, even where they are carpeted, and neither is a bathroom or a tiled kitchen with nothing soft in it. A through-lounge that was originally two rooms is counted as the one space it is now, and a conservatory or a carpeted garage counts if the dog sleeps out there.
That gives you the arithmetic before you pick up the phone: the first room is £180 and every room after it is £60, so a lounge and one bedroom is £240 and a lounge with three bedrooms is £360. If you are not sure whether a particular space counts, describe the layout when you ring and we will settle it before anything is booked rather than on the day. Where fleas hide around the home helps if you are trying to decide which rooms to include, and fleas in beds and sofas covers the furniture in them.
The Vet's Part, and the Timing
Every cat and dog in the household needs treating by your vet, including an indoor cat that never goes out, and the nearer that is to the day the rooms are dealt with the better. Ask the vet what they recommend for your animals and follow that rather than picking something off a shelf; they will also tell you where to keep the pet while the rooms are being seen to and when it can go back in. Leaving one animal untreated is the surest way to end up back where you started, because it keeps supplying what is in the floor. Whether pet flea treatments clear the house explains why neither side works on its own.
Tell us when you book if there is a pet in the house, what it is and where it sleeps, along with anything else that matters on the day — a fish tank, a bird, a reptile, a child with asthma, somebody working shifts. Those are the things worth mentioning at the booking stage rather than when we arrive.
What Normally Happens in the Weeks After
Nobody can put an honest date on the end of a flea problem, and you should be wary of anyone who does. How long it takes depends on how long the fleas have been established, how much carpet and soft furnishing there is, how warm the house is kept and whether every animal was treated at the same time. How long flea treatment takes to work sets out what makes the difference between one house and another.
Why bites can carry on for a while
The reason biting does not stop the moment the door closes is that the youngest stage of a flea sits sealed in a cocoon until something tells it a meal has arrived, and warmth and footsteps are that signal. They come out in ones and twos over a period rather than all at once, which is exactly what you want to happen. A few new bites in the days after a visit are part of the normal course of things rather than a sign that it failed. Why fleas can still bite after treatment goes through the usual explanations.
Vacuuming Afterwards, and Why It Helps
- Run the vacuum over the treated rooms every day at first, then a few times a week as things settle
- Go slowly along the skirtings, under the beds and behind the sofa — the edges of a room matter more than the middle
- Empty the cylinder or the bag into the outside bin each time rather than leaving it in the machine
- Include the spots the pet actually uses: its bed, the end of the sofa, the mat by the door, the foot of a bed
- Wash pet bedding and throws on a hot cycle where the labels allow it, every couple of weeks
- Keep the rooms warm and lived in rather than shutting them up, since that is what brings the last of them out
When to Get Back in Touch
Ring us if the bites are clearly not easing off after a few weeks, if live fleas are still jumping onto socks in a treated room, or if biting starts up in a room that was left out of the original booking — that last one usually means the count was short rather than anything else. Have the dates to hand and be specific about which rooms, since that is what tells us whether we are looking at a room that was missed, a pet that was not treated in step, or simply the tail end of a normal hatch. Our Brent flea advice takes the wider view of the whole problem.
Keeping It From Starting Again
In a house with animals in it this is maintenance rather than a one-off job, and most of it is small and regular. Flea Control Brent covers the rest of the borough, and neighbouring Alperton deals with fleas left behind in a let.
- Keep every animal's protection current on your vet's schedule, through the winter as well as the summer
- Have a rescue or newly arrived pet checked over before it settles onto the furniture
- Vacuum the two or three places your pet favours every week, edges and underneath included
- Groom a dog over a hard floor or outside rather than over the lounge carpet
- Check a second-hand rug, mattress or armchair before it comes through the front door
- If you let a property out and a pet has lived in it, say so, so the next household is not caught out
