I read your post on using Diatomaceous earth and got to the point where you were trying to desicate flea eggs by using a dehumidifier.
Your experiment involved heating a room above 105F to dry out the room..
This is backwards. If you heat the air, the surfaces will be cooler than the air. Yes, hotter air can hold more water, but water will always prefer a cooler surface.
The way to dessicate a surface is to have the surface warmer than the ambient air.
Another factor will be the presence of what I'll call "constant humidity salts" on surfaces. Soaps, surfactants, sodium hydroxide, sodium chloride (table salt) will tend to maintain a certain humidity in a closed environment if in a saturated solution. So a clean rinsed surface will get dryer than one coated with carpet cleaner.
My mind now goes to how I can uniformly warm all surfaces to dry out a room.
The infrared heaters being sold today warm surfaces and not the air. These should work great at keeping surfaces dry. It might be hard to warm shadowy places, so another strategy needs to be used there, like diatomaceous earth, sticky stuff, barriers.
So, here's my plan.. (yes, this summer was a bad flea year)
1) Do the diatomaceous thing with the expectation that I'll not get rid of all the fleas.
2)This winter, I'll try to heat my crawl space so that the floors are warmer than the room air.
3) Then set my house on fire... (guaranteed way to get rid of fleas in a home... JUST KIDDING!)
P.S. I was wondering, would it be possible to use an iron to fry the eggs in my carpet? It would take a long time to get the heat down far enough, but, hey, protein is protein.
