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Can I Flea Bomb One Room and Stay in the House? What You Need To Know!
Pete Ortiz
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Nobody wants to deal with bugs in their home, but no one wants to leave their house for an extended period either. So, can you only bug bomb one room and still stay in the house?
The short answer is no, you need to leave the house, but the details are important. Here, we cover why you must leave the house during the flea bomb process, and we highlight what you need to do to effectively remove all the fleas from your home.
Can You Flea Bomb One Room and Stay in the House?
While there are a few precautions that you can take to make it safer to bug bomb a room and stay in the house, the truth is that you can never make it safe enough to be worth the risk. The insecticides can easily seep past any loose seals, and then it’s easy for them to enter your airways.
This can lead to asthma, conjunctivitis, contact dermatitis, and other severe health conditions. While most of these issues should clear up after mild irritation, some can last a lifetime. It’s not worth the risk — just stay out of the house when you’re using a flea bomb.
Image By: Bilal Kocabas, Shutterstock
Can You Only Flea Bomb One Room?
While you can flea bomb only one room of your home, we highly recommend against it. Bugs, fleas included, rarely stay in one room. They travel all over the house, even if one room is more of a hotspot than the others.
Also, even if you take out all the fleas in one room, any bugs left in other rooms can quickly lead to a new infestation. That means you’ll be right back to where you started, and that’s more frustrations and another bug bomb in your home that you’ll need to plan for.
How Long Do You Need to Stay Out of the House After a Flea Bomb?
While you need to leave the house when you’re flea bombing your house, you don’t need to leave for as long as you might think. While TV shows and movies show people leaving their homes for days at a time, you typically only need to be out of the house for 2 to 4 hours after using a flea bomb.
This gives the vapors from the insecticide plenty of time to settle down and enables you to safely re-enter the home, given the right precautions. Considering that you only need to spend a few hours outside of the house, there’s no reason to stay inside when using a flea bomb.
While using a flea bomb won’t eliminate the root cause of fleas in your home, it can be one of the most effective ways of clearing up a flea infestation — as long as you pair it with other flea control methods.
Even after you use a flea bomb, you should still vacuum your entire home, wash sheets, and use flea control products on your pets. Don’t skip any of these steps; otherwise, you’ll find that you’re right back where you started, with fleas overtaking your house again.
What to Do After Using a Flea Bomb
After you let 2 to 4 hours pass, it’s time to head back into your home and clean up. You’ll want to do this before you bring any children or pets back inside.
When you re-enter the house, we recommend wearing both a respirator and gloves, so none of the insecticides can work their way onto your skin or into your airways while you’re cleaning up. Immediately vacuum every surface in your home, and wipe down any countertops, so the insecticide has nowhere to stay. This is a time-consuming process, but it’s the best way to avoid any negative side effects from the flea bomb.
You need to do this for each room that you flea bombed. Not only will this clean up the insecticide, but you’ll also be cleaning up the dead bugs in the process. Next, wash any clothes and bedding in the home.
Only after you’ve completed all these steps should you feel comfortable removing your respirator and gloves and letting kids and pets back into the house.
Final Thoughts
Fleas are no fun, and neither is using and dealing with a flea bomb. But at least once you finish cleaning up afterward, you know that you won’t have to deal with any bugs crawling around anymore.
It’s a ton of work, and you need to stay out of your home for a few hours, but it’ll be worth it once you have a flea-free home again!
Featured Image Credit: Bilal Kocabas, Shutterstock
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Writer
Pete Ortiz
Pete has been working in the trades since high school, where he first developed a passion for woodworking. Over the years, he has developed a keen interest in a wide variety of DIY projects around the home. Fascinated by all sort of tools, Pete loves reading and writing about all the latest gadgets and accessories that hit the market. His other interests include astronomy, hiking, and fishing.
As the founder of House Grail, Pete's primary goal is to help consumers make educated decisions about DIY projects at home, in the garage, and in the garden.
