A British couple died from carbon monoxide poisoning while on holiday at a luxury resort in Egypt after the room next door was sprayed with pesticide to kill bed bugs, a coroner has found.
Nah, the maintenance guys in my old apartment building a few years ago doused my unit and me with aerosolized chemicals. Fun times. I’m assuming it’s much cheaper than heat treating.
Heat treating is tricky since it involves getting the entire area heated up to around 55 degrees I believe. That includes anywhere they’re hiding, so it needs to be a consistent 55 degrees throughout. Usually there’s like these big tent structures and such involved.
It’s more effective than poison though, at a 100% lethality if you do it right.
My uncle owns apartments and he has eradicated them any time they’ve been an issue. He seals the place up with plastic over the windows and duct tape, drags in several large kerosene heaters, blasts the place and monitors the temperature. Bam, problem solved literally every time.
He has had issues with people who keep bringing them in by allowing the same visitors sometimes. Particularly this one family who lived in two of his apartments. Once they left it hasn’t been an issue.
Anyone who has followed his advice after the second treatment, “Someone who is coming here is bringing them in on you. Don’t have anyone over for awhile and you’ll see.” has had the problem eliminated. He uses bifenthrin as a preventative measure in other apartments when someone reports them. That always seems to keep them isolated.
I used to live in an apartment complex with bedbug issues.
This complex, to be precise. As you can see there’s a lot of apartments.
We’d get Anticimex over to spread diatomaceous earth. Diatomaceous earth works by sticking to the bugs and drying them out. Usually things will die within a few hours. While effective, it takes time to get all of the insects. You’ll need to wait for whatever eggs around to hatch and grow up and die as well, so expect to leave the powder around for a month or so. It also involves placing it all strategically since all the bugs need to walk through it.
Since we were the ones to report the issue, they’d only do our apartment. The bedbugs never came from us to begin with, so while the diatomaceous earth would work and reduce the problem to basically nothing, after a while the bedbugs would find their way back! We complained to the landlord several times, said that they need to properly investigate the complex and find whichever apartments need sanitising, and get that over with. They never did so presumably that complex is still absolutely infested.
Over the course of a few months we carefully sanitised all of our possessions (I was inspecting books page by page), washed what we could in high temperatures, and stored stuff away in a rented locker, double-sealing everything in bin liners and duct tape. We tossed a lot of stuff too.
Managed to avoid bringing the fuckers with us. It’s been years now and I’m still shaking out my clothes before I go anywhere to ensure there’s nothing with me.
The proteins that make up the bugs bodies denature (kind of unfurl) at around 45-49 degrees. Hence you want to bring the area up to 55-60 degrees and keep it there for a while to ensure that all the bugs die.
It makes sense your uncle deals with it that way, had we been given that as an option I would’ve taken that too. It’s 100% effective and works super fast compared to poison or diatomaceous earth. And well, if you have pets (like me) or young children then poison while cathartic, isn’t the most optimal solution.
Jesus, I thought heat treating had become the norm for dealing with bed bugs?
Nah, the maintenance guys in my old apartment building a few years ago doused my unit and me with aerosolized chemicals. Fun times. I’m assuming it’s much cheaper than heat treating.
Heat treating is tricky since it involves getting the entire area heated up to around 55 degrees I believe. That includes anywhere they’re hiding, so it needs to be a consistent 55 degrees throughout. Usually there’s like these big tent structures and such involved.
It’s more effective than poison though, at a 100% lethality if you do it right.
My uncle owns apartments and he has eradicated them any time they’ve been an issue. He seals the place up with plastic over the windows and duct tape, drags in several large kerosene heaters, blasts the place and monitors the temperature. Bam, problem solved literally every time.
He has had issues with people who keep bringing them in by allowing the same visitors sometimes. Particularly this one family who lived in two of his apartments. Once they left it hasn’t been an issue.
Anyone who has followed his advice after the second treatment, “Someone who is coming here is bringing them in on you. Don’t have anyone over for awhile and you’ll see.” has had the problem eliminated. He uses bifenthrin as a preventative measure in other apartments when someone reports them. That always seems to keep them isolated.
Gosh that feels so familiar.
I used to live in an apartment complex with bedbug issues.
This complex, to be precise. As you can see there’s a lot of apartments.
We’d get Anticimex over to spread diatomaceous earth. Diatomaceous earth works by sticking to the bugs and drying them out. Usually things will die within a few hours. While effective, it takes time to get all of the insects. You’ll need to wait for whatever eggs around to hatch and grow up and die as well, so expect to leave the powder around for a month or so. It also involves placing it all strategically since all the bugs need to walk through it.
Since we were the ones to report the issue, they’d only do our apartment. The bedbugs never came from us to begin with, so while the diatomaceous earth would work and reduce the problem to basically nothing, after a while the bedbugs would find their way back! We complained to the landlord several times, said that they need to properly investigate the complex and find whichever apartments need sanitising, and get that over with. They never did so presumably that complex is still absolutely infested.
Over the course of a few months we carefully sanitised all of our possessions (I was inspecting books page by page), washed what we could in high temperatures, and stored stuff away in a rented locker, double-sealing everything in bin liners and duct tape. We tossed a lot of stuff too.
Managed to avoid bringing the fuckers with us. It’s been years now and I’m still shaking out my clothes before I go anywhere to ensure there’s nothing with me.
The proteins that make up the bugs bodies denature (kind of unfurl) at around 45-49 degrees. Hence you want to bring the area up to 55-60 degrees and keep it there for a while to ensure that all the bugs die.
It makes sense your uncle deals with it that way, had we been given that as an option I would’ve taken that too. It’s 100% effective and works super fast compared to poison or diatomaceous earth. And well, if you have pets (like me) or young children then poison while cathartic, isn’t the most optimal solution.