How do I get rid of carpet beetles? My entire house is infested, I find the shed skins and larvae everywhere. I sweep daily! Now the shed skins are coming out of the heater vents! What can I do to get rid of these black carpet beetles forever?
What do you know? I now use LOTS (about a CUP )of 20 Mule Team Borax in all my clothes washing! All the tiny gnats, moths, and other insects that come in from the garden are all gone, and the clothes/linens are GREAT. Boric Acid is poison, kills insects, and must be related to Borax somehow, because it has worked for me for two months, now. I plan to sprinkle it all over my carpet paths, leave it a week, then vaccum it up before steam cleaning with an old steamer. Also I plan to toss an old flea collar into the vacuum bad if it's not full now.
How'd I know I had some kind of bug? There were tiny red peppery spots/ stains around the lid of my washer with each wash, prior to using the Borax. After using it, there have been no signs at all.
Good luck. : )
Here are the questions asked by community members. Read on to see the answers provided by the ThriftyFun community.
I killed a carpet beetle larvae in my walk-in closet a couple of months ago. At the time I didn't know what kind of bug it was, only that it wasn't a bed bug so I didn't think anything of it. (I had a mild bed bug infestation in my last apartment.)
Tonight, I found two more of these things in my linen closet so I did some Googling and was able to ID them as the varied carpet beetle larvae. I haven't seen any adults so I'm not sure where they came from. I also didn't see any holes in my sheets and clothes (knock on wood).
I vacuumed my apartment thoroughly and sprinkled some diatomaceous earth along the walls of my closets. I have no idea where the source of the problem is. I looked all over the interior of my apartment. My best guess is that they're coming from outside, another apartment unit, or maybe even the basement of the apartment building. What else can I do to prevent a severe infestation? I don't want to use moth balls and pesticides like a lot of websites suggest, because I have two cats.
By Amy
ThriftyFun is one of the longest running frugal living communities on the Internet. These are archives of older discussions.
