# Flies in my furnace room! **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [December 28, 2020, 4:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/flies-in-my-furnace-room/929068 "2020-12-28T04:57:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![squeegee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/squeegee/32/14537_2.png) [@squeegee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/squeegee)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2020, 4:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/flies-in-my-furnace-room/929068/1 "2020-12-28T04:57:19Z")
For those who enjoyed the [Tiny moths in my office, Arg!](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tiny-moths-in-my-office-arg/927617) thread, the next mystery. My office is downstairs in my house, which is _not_ ground floor because this is a hillside house: the ground floor is upstairs where the living area, kitchen and master bedroom are. Down here are two bedrooms, a den, laundry, and a furnace/storage room. My furnace/storage room opens [off the laundry room](https://imgur.com/a/ETWOPWK) and is 20+ feet long, 6 feet wide, so [there’s room for a long row](https://imgur.com/a/MOaQo79) of [steel shelves for stuff plus the furnace/water heater.](https://imgur.com/a/LlntIfS) I’d renovated the storage/laundry from a completely unfinished ‘attic’ area under the house a couple of years ago. It’s a pretty cool setup. Fast forward to today, when I have two common houseflies cruising around my office (now that the moths are gone). Ugh, how’d those get in? I kill them, then for unrelated reasons I go into the storage room and… holy crap, there’s flies hanging all over the walls! I grab a dish cloth (I’m murder on flies with one) and get to work and kill probably 10 or more in that storage room. Where the f are they coming from? This is a below-ground room. I’ve had mice problems, so I set a couple of traps in there. I can see maybe they’re feeding off some dead mouse under the house, but holy hell. I’d expect if there’s a corpse I’d smell something, but nada. It’s 9pm on a Sunday, so I’ll get a no-pest strip or something tomorrow, but who expects a fly infestation in a basement? ---
**Author:** ![needscoffee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/needscoffee/32/1076_2.png) [@needscoffee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/needscoffee)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2020, 5:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/flies-in-my-furnace-room/929068/2 "2020-12-28T05:59:19Z")
When I found flies like that last year, I much later found a dead decaying bird hidden under my bed by my cat. It never smelled. It was in July and I had a lot of airflow in the house, but you’d think it would have smelled. I have a really sensitive sense of smell. Another time more recently that I noticed flies, I found a fresh mouse kill, but it was new enough that it wouldn’t have smelled yet. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2020, 7:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/flies-in-my-furnace-room/929068/3 "2020-12-28T07:37:56Z")
Flies in the furnace, shoo fly shoo! I do hope you aren’t infested with pantry moths. ---
**Author:** ![squeegee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/squeegee/32/14537_2.png) [@squeegee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/squeegee)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2020, 4:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/flies-in-my-furnace-room/929068/4 "2020-12-28T16:41:36Z")
These are common flies, not pantry moths. And there is nothing - _nothing_ - to eat in that furnace room. Computer parts, boxes of documents, yada. No grains, zip. ---
**Author:** ![squeegee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/squeegee/32/14537_2.png) [@squeegee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/squeegee)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2020, 3:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/flies-in-my-furnace-room/929068/5 "2020-12-29T03:43:13Z")
Well, since there _is_ nothing to eat in that furnace room, I just shoved a cloth under the door to keep the little fuckers in there, and I’ll check at the end of the week, and they should be dead or dying from starvation. They were quite lethargic when I was in there earlier, probably for that reason. I liken this to when you have a fly on the interior of a screened window: just close the window and watch the bastard bake in the sun. Meanwhile, I’ll wait a couple of weeks and go spelunking under the house, once I’m pretty sure whatever died down there (definitely a mouse that ate my bait) won’t be crawling with maggots, ick, and see if I can figure out how the mice are getting under the house (no doubt a vent screen broken or something) and from there into the furnace room (no doubt I need to nail some hardware cloth around where various vents/pipes/etc pierce the furnace/water heater wall). Before anybody worries, the furnace room has adequate venting with the door sealed, which is likely how the flies got in.