Fleas are an occasional problem in the San Francisco and San Mateo county areas. If you have pets, make sure they are regularly treated for flea control in a method approved by your veterinarian.

If your pets are not treated, your flea problem may persist and worsen the longer they remain untreated and may spread to your home.

Here are a few questions we like to ask to ascertain the problem:

• Have you seen any fleas?  Or are you seeing red marks on your body?  If you want to inspect for fleas, put a dish of soapy water on your floor, on top of a white towel.  The white towel will allow you to see fleas, and if any are around, a few should hop into the soapy water, and get stuck, thus allowing us to see them.
• If you do have fleas, they have to be coming from an animal. Do you have pets in your unit, or does a neighboring unit have a pet? 
• If your pet(s) or your neighbor’s are untreated, they could be feeding fleas into your unit. Any pets must be treated with Veterinarian approved flea treatments for our treatment to be effective.
• If there is a bird nest, or a rodent nest nearby, or if racoons are sleeping nearby, they could be the source of fleas in your unit and would need to be dealt with before the treatment would truly be efficacious. 

If you see only a few fleas on your pet and your pet is being treated, you probably do not need to have your home treated.

 We do not treat buildings of more than 3 units but do give a break on the cost for servicing more than one unit on the same visit. We treat all the floors with a product called PT Alpine Flea and Bedbug, which is a combination of two materials, one which kills any living fleas, and the other, which persists for up to 6 months, which kills eggs and newly hatched fleas.  However these materials take time because of the flea life cycle: it kills live fleas within about 7 days, but then there are waves of waiting for flea eggs to hatch out to be killed by the compound.  In serious infestations it can take up to 21 days as wave after wave hatch out and are finally killed. Regulations do not allow us to respray during that time, nor would doing so make the material work any faster.

We guarantee our work, so if you keep seeing fleas after 3 weeks, we’ll come back out. In the interim, we strongly suggest you vacuum regularly. if you have pets in the building which are not being treated for fleas, you will need to do that in order for the treatment to be effective.  If rodents or raccoons etc, are harboring on your property, that will need to be dealt with in order for the treatment to be effective and for our guarantee to be valid.

Before we treat, it helps to have all clothes and other non-furniture items picked up off the floors.  We treat all the floors and some inches under furniture. Humans and any pets will need to be out of the area being treated, during and for 1 hour after treatment.  If there is a room that will not be treated with a door, you and your pet can go in there until the spray is dry. The material we use is not a fumigant. 

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