This is something we get asked about a lot. The short answer is, yes! I went on quite a journey to find a solution though, so let me tell you about it.
In the wild, moths do an excellent job. Out of the thousands of species of moth, there are just a few that eat keratin. It’s the larvae that eat it actually. They eat up fur, feathers, skin and generally tidy up dead and decaying things. It’s a bit eww but that’s their job. When they find their way into our homes they can be a real problem as they set to work on our woollen clothes and home furnishings. There are not many treatments against wool moth, and there was no permanent treatment for our Chimney Sheep®. We tried borax but this didn’t stay in the wool very well. Also, it relies on the wool moth larvae eating a tiny bit in order to be poisoned by it, and if a lot of larvae eat a tiny bit, it is still going to get eaten away.
After extensive searching, I found a company in Austria that had developed a plasma treatment for wool. It changes the ionic charge of the wool fibres so that the moth doesn’t even recognise it as wool and flies on by. It’s clever, it’s chemical free and it’s permanent. It was the solution to my problem! I just had to go out there and persuade them to treat my Herdwick wool. Only Herdwick wool is coarse and wiry enough for the Chimney Sheep, so I couldn’t buy their lovely soft wool as they wanted me to.
They agreed to process our wool if I could send them large enough batches of it. And so Operation Wool began. We collect the Herdwick wool directly from farmers in the Lake District, send it to Yorkshire to get washed, then off to Austria to get moth-proofed and made into felt all in one go.
Why can’t you get it moth-proofed in the UK?
I get asked this a lot too. There is nowhere in the UK that does it. We’re lucky it’s in Europe, really, because it’s the only place in the world that can do the Ionic Protect plasma treatment. It would be great if it could be licensed in the UK, but even then, it would have to be with one of the massive wool processors. We are too small and we don’t have the facilities, capital to invest in machinery, expertise, person-power to do it at our place. So we are very happy to work with our Austrian partners. They also produce the Sheepwool Insulation. It’s the only insulation that is 100% wool and 100% moth-proofed. It’s layered in such a way that it retains its “loft” without needing any additional material adding to it.
Why do you sell moth treatments on your website?
I don’t get asked this, but I’m sure people think it. I did a lot of research before reaching the Ionic Protect solution. There are a lot of nasty chemicals on the market, and I wanted to make the more benign ones readily available. We sell the pheromone moth traps that attract the male moth. I never knew, for example, that clothes moths avoid the light. I do a lot of work with bats, and this inevitably leads to working with people who are interested in bat food, namely moths. It's common to put light traps out to attract moths and see what’s flying about. Not clothes moths, if they see a light they will avoid it, which is why they like dark places like chimneys. So if you set a trap that smells like a gorgeous lady moth, poor old male moth will come along and splat! He’s stuck. It’s not terribly kind but think of your beautiful wool rugs and carry on.
If you’re too kind to kill moths then we have some effective moth deterrents. They smell lovely to us but revolting to moths, so it keeps them at bay. And if you want something that effectively kills Mrs Moth, Mr Moth and wool-devouring baby moth, without getting into the environment and killing everything else, then our Pistal professional insecticide is the stuff for you.
So you can rest assured that all our Chimney Sheep chimney draught excluders are moth-proofed. All our Sheepwool insulation, including wool gap-filler and Useful Bit of Insulation is moth-proofed. The pipe lagging and Herdwick Wool Underlay are moth-proofed. The Herdwick Wool Project Felt contains 50% Ionic Protect wool, as we make it out of our felt scraps and washed Herdwick wool 50/50. The rest of our wool products are not treated against moths but we've got the equipment for you to manage the pesky pests.
