How Do I Clean and Remove Fleas From My Mattress?

Sigh. Fido is a darling, but really – fleas in BED?!? There’s nothing worse than finding biting little jumpy things in the serene sanctums of your bed. Plus, fleas breed at a rather alarming rate, so if you’ve become the victim of their attentions, there’s no time to lose.

Follow our simple, three-step system to quickly eradicate fleas from your cosy sleeping environs.
Step 1

Strip your mattress of all sheets and bedding and wash them in hot soapy water at a temperature of at least 95 degrees. Your washing machine’s hot water setting should be more than enough do the trick. A normal household dryer’s settings are usually hot enough to kill fleas too, so dry all your bedding using your dryer’s highest heat setting. Fleas can’t survive in a hot dryer longer than 20 to 30 minutes, so between your washer and dryer, you’ll exact a double-whammy of a killing spree on the ghastly little creatures. Make sure to check the care instructions for your bedding first, and just keep in mind high heat settings can damage some fabrics. Be sure to transport your bedding to and from the laundry room using dedicated bags in order to prevent cross-contamination to other areas of your home.

Step 2

Next, vacuum the whole mattress surface two or three times, on both sides and the edges. If you have a bagless vacuum, immediately dump the resulting detritus in an outdoor trashcan, and wash the vacuum outside with HOT soapy water. If your vacuum has a bag, remove the bag and dispose of it outside.

Step 3

To not give them even the tiniest hope of survival, we’re going to completely de-flea your mattress. Some people recommend boric acid for this, but why have toxins near where you sleep when you can use less toxic, natural products.

You’ll need:

• Food-grade Diatomaceous Earth (aka, “DE”) Safe and non-toxic for you and total hell for fleas. It will completely wipe out your flea population within a few days’ time. Yay!

• Vet’s Best Natural Flea and Tick Home Spray, or similar

• A Mattress Cover To seal the above de-flea mixture into the vicinity of your mattress until all the fleas have, ahem, fleed.

Spray your bare mattress with the Vet’s Best spray, and then wait a few hours until the mattress is dry.

When dry, slip on the mattress cover and before you seal it up, squirt DE inside. Seal up the mattress cover. The DE is harmless to you but lethal to fleas, so you want to trap all the fleas in their with their arch nemesis. Once fleas come into contact with the DE, it only takes a couple hours to kill the adults, but it’s worth leaving your mattress sealed for a good month to make sure you get any hatched flea eggs too.

If the above seems like a lot of hard work, or if you’ve tried it all without success, give the Utah experts at Stone Surface Specialists a call. We can move things along exponentially with a good deep steam-clean treatment on your mattress. Give us a call today at 801 856 0164 to schedule your FREE consultation.