Help! Moths are eating my carpet.

[wellstopdoingitthen]

We only have carpet on our stairs and landing, the rest is hard flooring.

first noticed some tiny moths a few months back. They were tiny and would jump up when I vacuumed the stairs each week.

I bought some spray and little containers containing a chemical and applied it all over. I have also hung repellent pods in our stairs cupboard.

When I vacuumed the landing I saw that there are now big holes in the carpet, no sign of moths.

Is this cureable?

Any recommendations for effective products.

I can’t afford to replace the carpet at the moment and I don’t want a new one ruined anyway.
Would my house insurance cover it do you think?

It makes me feel really dirty, I am reluctant to vacuum the area as it’s all disappearing up the hoover.

Any suggestions welcome.

This sounds more like carpet mites.
I'd cover your carpets in bicarbonate of soda and leave 24hrs then hoover. repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. This will dry them out and is non toxic.

I'd then spray the whole carpet area a couple of times a week with white vinegar, you will use a lot but it works.

Oh dear. We had these. We had to get the whole house sprayed professionally. Twice. Cost around £600 but they’re gone now. They were around for years before hand no matter what we used eating our carpet, curtains, clothing. Everything. The other option was super heating the house and that’s more guaranteed to work but is about £1500.

Sorry, moths are really really hard to get rid of. Call Rentokil but plan on replacing every carpet and never buy wool.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czrlj41jy7mo.amp

We found we had moth infestation right before we had a wool carpet put in.

Used a flea spray - Invorex - and it got rid of them. Had to be thorough - every wardrobe, drawer, basket - everything pulled out, sprayed and hoovered.

I keep a bunch of moth traps (Manchester moth men) around to keep monitoring them and they've not come back yet. (Fingers crossed).

Little brown carpet moths. They move slowly but its the larvae that do the damage.
Buy some carpet moth spray.
Get a torch and pull out/ tip over EVERY SINGLE piece of furniture and look for what appear to be grains of rice.
You need to do this every single day and clean the furniture, edges of carpet and spray everywhere.

It's the caterpillars that eat the carpet, the moths lay eggs and the caterpillars destroy it. They apparently have little shells and are pretty hard to kill and of course the damage is already done! They go for clothing too, so check your suits, jackets, woollens for damage too.

The culprits look like inoffensive grains of rice. Don’t be fooled!

Horrendous, awful things. Two professional treatments didn’t get rid of them so we ended up getting rid of all the carpet. Vile. And yes, they look like rice 🤮🤮🤮

Thank you all for the suggestions. I’m going to try the spray again and vacuum like mad. I haven’t noticed any rice-like larvae but they must be there.

I'm hoping that as we don’t have carpet anywhere else in the house it’s at least confined to the landing and stairs 🤞.

I got rid of a big moth infestation, including carpets, with Zero In.

Vigorous vacuuming and then spraying with Zero In aerosol. Then I sent for loads of sticky pheromone traps from the internet and put them under all furniture, in all cupboards etc. And bought the Zero In moth killer papers and stuffed my wardrobes and drawers.

Moth balls / repellent are useless, you need killer.

And yes, protect any wool based materials. They will get your jumpers, coats, any wool craft items etc.

Also OP, we were advised that doing fewer extremely thorough vacuums is better than going over a hundred times haphazardly.

So be methodical, get your nozzles out, and get into all of the tiny nooks and crannies. Good luck!