Roztocze – How To Deal With Them?

Dust mites  are a major cause of allergies, affecting more and more people. Dust mites love to live in a humid environment and appear most often in the fall. In this article, we’ll give you some tips on how to get rid of dust mites in your home and prevent them from spreading.

Perhaps people who are allergic to mites are familiar with some of these preventive measures, but others may find them surprising and help them see significant improvements after taking them.

How to fight dust mites? – Get rid of excessive humidity from the rooms

As we mentioned, mites live in a humid environment, so the first step should be to assess whether your home may be excessively humid (due to climate, weather or location).

If we come to the conclusion that this is the case, we can use dehumidifiers, natural or electric, placing them in different parts of the house. 

Air the rooms daily

Dust mites thrive most quickly in warm, humid places such as bedding, duvets, sofas, curtains, plush toys, mattresses, pillows, rugs, etc. Most of these items are essential, but some are worth having.

Therefore, we recommend airing the rooms every day, even if possible, let the sun shine directly on the areas exposed to mites.

Clean with rosemary vinegar to kill dust mites

We can prepare rosemary vinegar very easily. You should leave a few fresh sprigs of rosemary in the vinegar marinade for a week, after which we can use it as a disinfectant and as a natural household cleaner.

For cleaning, use a cloth moistened with vinegar and wipe the furniture with it. The mixture will also work well for cleaning floors.

Use diffusers with essential oils

Aroma diffusers not only allow us to fill rooms with beautiful fragrances, but also naturally fight mites. In this case, we recommend such fragrance oils as:

• Lemon
• Cinnamon
• Lemongrass
• Pepper mint
• Tea tree
• Rosemary
• Lavender

If we do not have a diffuser, we can add a few drops of essential oil to the water and use an atomizer bottle to spray them all over the house during the day.

When buying essential oils, you should make sure that they are of good quality and come from plants, not just fragrance oils without any properties.

Purify the air with houseplants

An economical and natural way to clean the air in a room is to place some potted plants there. However, you should pay attention to what plants you choose.

Some of them, instead of helping us to clean the air, will additionally pollute it. In this case, we have to look for air-purifying plants, which are:

• Dypsis  lutescens (Arctic palm). It is a plant that cleans the air during the day. Therefore, we should often clean its leaves, because it is on them that dirt accumulates. This plant is not very demanding. Adapts to low light and low humidity.
• Guinean Sansevieria (a plant from the mousyidae family). This plant converts carbon dioxide into oxygen overnight, so it’s perfect for placing in your bedroom.

• Golden epipremnum (evergreen climbers of the picture family). It is a very resistant plant, ideally suited to staying indoors, it does not need to have direct access to sunlight.
• Other potted plants that we can choose are: Sternberg’s herb, ivy, ficus, difenbachia.

Weekly cleaning to eliminate mites

Weekly cleaning of the aforementioned items will prevent the occurrence of mites. We can do it with warm water with a rinse aid and rosemary vinegar. The ideal scenario is to dry cleaned items in the sun or with a dryer.

Of course, we cannot forget to clean sofas, chairs or carpets from time to time.

Acaricides – acaricides

There are many products on the market that are designed to combat and prevent the spread of mites. Their price is much higher than that of natural remedies that we can prepare at home.

But if we suffer greatly from dust mite allergies, we should at least invest in these necessary resources. We can, for example, obtain pillowcases and an acaricidal sheet.

Also, keep in mind that many of the acaricides that are available (antifungal paints, air purifiers) don’t quite work. However, it’s best to find out for yourself and try them in your own home.