Bed Bug BBQ using heat treatment to eradicate bed bugs
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The Safest Way to Eradicate Bed Bugs

Finding bed bugs in your home can be a frustrating experience, especially if you don’t have all the information about bed bugs and your options for getting rid of them. Your first thought might be to find something you can spray and get rid of them, like you would with an ant infestation. However, if you have kids or pets, you might be concerned about filling your home with chemicals and fumes. How do you get rid of these pests safely?

What Not to Do

There’s a lot of false information out there about what methods will get rid of bed bugs. First off, though it might sound easy to just go to the hardware store and pick up a spray, unfortunately, that won’t work. The main reason that a spray won’t work is that there’s no way for you to find and eliminate every last bed bug. Bed bugs are very sneaky and find the tiniest, most subtle places to hide. No matter how hard you look, you will almost inevitably miss one or two. You’ll put away your spray, satisfied with a job well done, and the bed bugs will crawl out and start all over again. A few weeks later, you’ve got another infestation on your hands. Plus, the amount of spray you would need to get through your entire home will leave a smell that could last for days. You don’t want to be breathing in those chemicals for days, and you especially don’t want your children, pets, or perhaps elderly relatives to be breathing them in either.

Essential Oils… Are They Essentially Useless?

Your next thought for a non-chemical method of eliminating bed bugs might be essential oils. Essential oils have been used for a long time, but in the past few years their popularity has soared. They’re used for everything from natural healing to homemade cleaning products. It makes sense to think that some of these oils might be toxic to bed bugs and therefore be a good way to get rid of them, however, that’s just not the case. Though silicone and paraffin oils have been proven to be effective against bed bugs, they are effective topically, meaning you’d have to spray the bugs directly in order to kill them. This presents the same problem as the chemical sprays – you most likely won’t be able to find and spray every single bed bug.

Ice Ice Baby…

Freezing the bed bugs might also occur to you as an alternative to chemicals. Bed bugs can’t survive the cold, right? You’d expect that to be the case. They’re just tiny bugs; what chance do they have against the freezing cold? Actually, they stand a better chance than you might think. Bed bugs can actually survive for several days in the cold. So first, you’d have to place the item you found the bed bugs on – your bed sheet, for example – in the freezer for about three days to be sure they’re all gone. If you’ve found the bugs on your duvet as well, that could be a rather tight fit, depending on the size of your freezer. The main problem though, is that if you find the bugs in your bed, they’ve likely already crawled onto your carpet, maybe into the pages of the books on your bookshelf…at that point, it’s too late for the freezing method to work. You haven’t caught it early, unfortunately, and trying to freeze them is just an overall bad idea.

What Works?

bed bug heat treatment temperature above 140 degrees will eradicate bed bugs

If none of those methods work, then what can you do to remove the bed bugs from your home? The answer is simple: heat treatment. Bed bugs can survive the cold for several days, but they can’t survive the heat for nearly that long. Any temperature over 130-145 degrees will kill bed bugs within the hour. You might be thinking, “If that’s true, then I can just throw my sheets in the dryer and that’ll kill them, right?” The answer is both yes and no. While yes, the dryer will kill the bed bugs on your sheets, it all comes back to the same problem: the bed bugs are not just on your sheets. By the time you find them, they’ve most likely crawled to other areas of your home, making the dryer treatment less effective. What you need to do is contact a professional pest removal service, who will come out to your home and do a heat treatment.

How Does Heat Treatment Work?

bed bug heat treatment fan equipment

When you contact Bed Bug BBQ and set up a heat treatment service, we come out to your home with heating equipment, large fans to move the heat through your home, and generators. We will then heat up your home to a deadly temperature for the bugs, and move your furniture out of the way. We use wireless monitors to keep track of the temperature in order to make sure your home stays warm enough for the duration of the heat treatment. After the heat treatment is over, we move your furniture back and remove our equipment. Congratulations! Your home is now bed bug free (guaranteed for 60 days), with no chemicals left behind and a very low risk of any damage. 

Ready to Get Started With Heat Treatment?

Need a heat treatment to safely eradicate bed bugs? We can help. Contact Bed Bug BBQ today for a FREE quote and inspection at (216) 221-1227 or through our website, and check out our other bed bug informational resources on identification, prevention, and eradication. 

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