How can I Eliminate Dust Mites?

There are a few simple ways for you to eliminate dust mites, and sometimes you may need to use a combination of various approaches to get the effect you’re after. Dust mites need a humidity level in the 50 to 100 percent range in order to thrive properly, so you may want to lower the humidity in your home significantly. This still leaves behind dead mites and their fecal matter, which causes an allergy for some people. To get rid of that stuff, you may need to vacuum and wash everything carefully. Some people also remove their carpets as part of an effort to eliminate dust mites.

Lowering indoor humidity, which is often the primary key to eliminating dust mites, will generally involve reducing the temperature inside of your home. Lowering temperatures tends to make the air dryer, so an air conditioner may be all you need in order to kill dust mites. According to some experts, a good temperature to aim for is the 75°F (about 24°C) range. It’s also common for dust mites to die in winter unless you live in a particularly warm climate or keep your house especially humid all the time.

Once you eliminate dust mites, that's generally just the beginning of the battle. The next thing to focus on is getting rid of their corpses and especially their feces. Vacuuming can be very helpful in this and so can steam cleaning. It is often necessary to use all of these techniques on your carpet as well as your bed linens and curtains.

Sometimes this will not be sufficient to eliminate dust mites, and you may have to take your carpet out of your house completely. In fact, people with a severe dust mite allergies are often advised to avoid living in places that have a carpet at all. Carpets are a very good place for dust to accumulate, and there can be millions of dust mites inside just a small area of many carpet surfaces.

Dust mites actually eat the dust itself, which is made up of all kinds of decay around a person’s house. One of the most common components of dust is actually dead human skin. Another component is decayed bug parts. People can be allergic to many different things in dust, so removing dust itself can also be important to preventing allergic symptoms in some people.