When your cat brings fleas into your home, it can be a struggle to contain and remove them. They’re super annoying, since even if you deal with the fleas on your cat with a treatment, they’ll soon be back.
The issue of flea infestation is one that’s best kept on top of with regular processes that stop them ever getting a foothold in your carpets and upholstery. There’s no quick fix, it involves effort on your part, though hopefully we can help you reduce the amount of effort it takes to keep your home flea free.
Here are some steps you can take to help remove fleas from your home and keep them away permanently.
Start with ridding your cat of fleas
Fleas didn’t wander in to your home on their own. They thrive on your pet and later jump into carpets or cottons where they can survive anywhere from a few days to a week or more. How long they survive depends on how well fed they were before leaving your cat for the carpet.
If the flea finds its way back on to your pet before it starves, it can resume normal operation and reproduce.
Take a look at some spot on flea treatments for quick relief that lasts up to a month. These do a good job of keeping fleas off your pet while you take the time to remove fleas from the surrounding areas in your home.
Vacuum to remove fleas from carpets
Now that your cat is protected from fleas for the meantime, you can turn your attention to ridding them from any carpets or surfaces where they may be waiting to jump back on.
Though any hoover will do the trick of collecting loose fleas, you will benefit from using a hoover for cat hair since it’ll pick up any small bits of fur in the carpets where fleas may be hiding.
Most of these hoovers come with attachments designed for use on upholstery too, so you’ll be covering more ground.
You should vacuum your home around one time per week for each pet in the household. Once a week is usually sufficient for one cat, but with two you’ll be needing to do it twice a week, and so on and so forth.
Wash and spray linens
Wash any linens around your home to make sure there aren’t any fleas ready to jump back out onto the carpet or worse, onto your cat.
After washing, you can use a flea spray for home use that will prevent adult fleas living in them. Since these sprays aren’t always as effective at killing fleas as actual cat flea treatments, you can only really rely on them to keep fleas out of carpets and linen.
They’ll likely jump ship into the carpet where your regular hoovering will take care of them.
Keep fleas off your cat
There are a few ways to achieve this, but depending on how susceptible your cat is to picking up fleas from their surroundings you may need to combine a few of the different ways of keeping fleas off your cat.
The simplest, easiest and cheapest method is to start actively combing your cat using a cat flea comb.
These combs are specially designed to drag fleas out of fur where you can take care of them.
Regular combing means adult fleas get less of a change to settle before being removed.
As well as this, a trusty flea collar for cats will do the job of keeping fleas away from your cat while they’re outdoors. Some of the best flea collars can keep fleas at bay for up to 8 months, though our findings show that 5 or 6 months is a more realistic expectation.
If your cat is notoriously bad for picking up the little devils, or you’re opposed to collars of topical flea treatments (that’s fine, plenty of people are!) then you take a look at cat shampoos for fleas.
Most of which are regular cat shampoos but with added flea control, so you get all the full benefits that regular cat shampoos offer such as improved coat and skin health.
Did you find this article helpful?