Tenant moved out first week in June and the house is now rampant with fleas. I have set off the Raid bombers FOUR times [put out all 4 bombers each time]!! Then I sprinkled the entire house with boric acid and let it sit for over 24 hours before vacuuming it up. The house has hardwood floors in all rooms except 2 bedrooms that have carpet. Vinyl in kitchen and bath. No curtains or drapes. Odd thing is the fleas are mainly in the living room by the front window and not in carpeted rooms at all.

Is my only option to hire an exterminator? I don’t know what else to do.

We got that gift form a tenant that we evicted. We used bug bombs (4 different times), sprayed the house repeatedly and vacuumed everything within an inch of it's life. We contacted our pest control guy but he did not offer us any quick fix! We learned: it is a process-not a one time deal. You have to keep killing the new fleas that hatch. It took us 6 weeks to rid the house of fleas. We vacuumed our pant legs and socks every time we left the house so we would not carry the pests to our home. If is on a crawl space, you may need to treat under the house too. Don't forget to treat the yard. Good Luck.

The thing I learned about bombs is that you don't use them by themselves; you use them to drive them out onto the stuff that will kill them.

I've had really good results from Nuvan ProStrips. I tried a zillion different things over the course of a month or two or three; when I tried the Nuvan Prostrips, I saw a huge difference in a week. They were almost all gone at the end of two weeks.

J(IN) is correct; well, at least on the Precor (can't comment on the dog running through the house.)

Precor contains an Insect Growth Inhibitor (IGR) which helps to break the cycle of egg to larvae to adult flea. Flea eggs are incredibly tough; typical bombs, sprays, etc. won't destroy them. Until you break that cycle flea eggs will just keep hatching and repeating the cycle over and over again.

We'll use a quick kill spray (Cynoff EC) and Nygard IGR.

Online places like domyownpestcontrol offer excellent products for dealing with this issue.

Gail

The worst flea issue we had was solved by daily vacuuming. We had already had the pest control guy out 3 or 4 times and still had lots of fleas.

I bought a cheap vacuum and kept it at the flea house to keep from transporting them to other houses. Then, vacuumed every day for about 2 weeks. The vibration helps hatch the eggs, so the fleas can be killed. I don't think there is anything that kills the eggs before they hatch.

We also use the carpet & room spray (I think it is made by Raid). For most cases, just 1-2 treatments with that take care of it. But, in more extreme cases, vacuuming and other treatments may be needed.

Interesting. It appears that if you have lots of fleas and people in the house you will have an up hill battle.

I don't see how that could be done.

Kyle is right, spray your pant legs and shoes with

deep woods off is what I have good results with before

going into the infested house.

I used raid flea bug bombs, sprinkled seven dust all over the carpets. Let set over night, vacuum the next

day, make sure you throw out the vac bag immediately

after vacuuming and replace with a new bag. Fleas can

get out of the vac and back in the carpet.

Repeat the flea bombs every week, sprinkle boric

acid or seven dust then vac after over night. Keep

doing this till fleas gone.

There are night light traps that are suppose to attract

My solution... ;)

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I call my locally owned pro exterminator and pay him $90, deducted from tenant's deposit, and move on. They give a 90 day warranty and will retreat for free! Worst case I had they had to come back 2x and even treated the lawn.

Bomb are useless. Just sends them into hiding or into the next room, behind baseboard, etc. Bombs don't kill the eggs which hatch out and start the cycle all over. Ditto anything you can buy at a Wal-Mart or over-the-counter. DoYouOwnPestControl is fine if you want to wait around for the products to be delivered, drive over to the house, hose yourself down with Deep Woods off, go inside a flea infested house and spend half an hour messing with stinky chemicals, then come home and strip in the garage, bag up all your clothing and wash it on HOT cycle and dry for 90 minutes on high heat.

And you get to repeat that process...maybe 3 times.

Think about this: add up the number of days * the daily rent lost rent by sitting vacant. Chances are you've already lost more money in vacancy by fiddling with this than you would have spent by simply hiring a competent, licensed pest control contractor.

The bombs used to work. The bombs no longer work. Forget about it. Last flea problem I had was in my own house, after my own dog died! She had been on the flea control and once that was gone, they went crazy on me. I am allergic to the bites so It was a miserable miserable three weeks.