Do Carpet Moth Traps Work in Theale Homes?

What the Trap Does

The card carries a synthetic copy of the female's scent. Males follow it and stick to it.

• Males only — females carry on laying
• Adults only — the larvae doing the damage are not attracted to anything
• Presence and rough intensity — genuinely useful, and the reason to bother
• Not a control measure — removing some males from a population of mated, laying females changes very little

The Cold-Space Problem

This is the part that matters in a property with unheated storage, and it is the reason traps mislead people here more than anywhere else.

Cold does not kill a carpet moth population. It slows it. Development stretches out, adults emerge later and in smaller numbers, and activity resumes as the space warms. A loft or garage can hold a healthy population through a winter and produce almost nothing on a trap card the whole time.

Reading a Trap in an Unheated Space

1. Compare like seasons. This spring against last spring, not spring against winter
2. Leave it far longer than you would indoors — a month rather than a fortnight, and check the bait life on the pack
3. Treat a low winter count as no information, not as reassurance
4. Look as well as trap. In a cold space, opening a box and looking beats any card
5. Any catch at all matters. One moth in a cold garage represents a population that is being suppressed by temperature, not by anything you have done

What They Are Genuinely Good For

• Confirming you have moths at all, before spending anything
• Finding roughly where they are concentrated across a property
• Watching a trend over months in a heated room
• Checking a treatment held, three months later, without moving furniture
• Monitoring a space you go into rarely — provided the season is accounted for

Placing Them

• Floor level, not on a shelf — these moths stay low
• Away from draughts, direct sunlight and doorways in constant use
• One per room or storage area, numbered, dated on the card
• In a garage, away from the door and out of the way of vehicles and feet
• In a loft, only where you can reach it from the hatch
• Written counts, kept. The trend is the information; a single number is not

Treatment starts from £220. If your counts come from unheated space, tell us the dates as well as the numbers — without the time of year, the figures do not mean much.