Why Are Small Moths Flying Near the Floor in My Pangbourne Home?

First, Rule Out the Wrong Moth

• Carpet and clothes moths avoid light, stay low, and run or flutter rather than fly properly
• Pantry moths live near kitchen cupboards, flour, cereal and dried pet food, and they fly towards a light
• Outdoor species come to a lit window at night and are usually larger

If it heads for a lamp, treating the floor will do nothing.

Reading the Room

Adults are poor fliers that stay low and move short distances. Where you see one is usually close to where it emerged, which makes location genuinely informative in an irregular room.

1. Around an alcove beside the chimney breast. Alcoves are dark, still, usually filled with fitted shelving or a cupboard, and the floor in them is never cleared
2. Along the chimney breast itself. An open or capped-off flue collects nesting material, and a disused fireplace is a route in from above
3. In a window seat or under a low sill. Storage under a seat is dark, dry and undisturbed
4. In a corner where the wall is out of true, leaving a gap behind the skirting that the carpet cannot follow
5. Around a fitted cupboard or built-in wardrobe, at its base
6. By a step or change of level, where the carpet or rug edge is cut and tucked

The Practical Version

1. Note over a fortnight which part of which room you see them in — a note on a phone is enough
2. Go to that spot and use a torch held low
3. Empty whatever is in the alcove or cupboard nearest it, right to the back
4. Turn back the rug or carpet edge at the nearest cut or tuck
5. Look at the base of any fitted furniture within a few feet
6. Check the fireplace and the flue if there is one

What You Are Looking For

• Fine silky webbing, sometimes with grains of debris in it
• A sandy debris the colour of the fibre being eaten
• Small cream larvae in cases the colour of the carpet or rug
• Irregular thinning where the floor is covered and still
• Old nesting material, if the flue is open

Treatment starts from £220. Tell us which part of the room you see them in and what is built into that part — in an irregular property that is the most useful thing you can say.