Don't think a lot of people who have won their war against them want to talk about them again. Lifelong trauma. Took a whole lot of joy out of life. No longer want to travel many places. Always...
Don't think a lot of people who have won their war against them want to talk about them again. Lifelong trauma. Took a whole lot of joy out of life. No longer want to travel many places. Always got some part of me looking around for signs of their presence. Worst part is knowing there are people out there that can't call a professional and take care of them properly either out of ignorance, selfishness, lack of finances, their psychological situation, or maybe something else. Remediation is better than it was 10-15 years ago and if you get a professional in and follow their instructions you'll be ok, but it's real hell.
About 9yrs ago, my room at my parents then-house got infested by bed bugs. They then spread from my room to my younger brother's room, via our shared "Jack and Jill" bathroom. I think I picked...
About 9yrs ago, my room at my parents then-house got infested by bed bugs. They then spread from my room to my younger brother's room, via our shared "Jack and Jill" bathroom. I think I picked them up while travelling within the US for work. It was a nightmare.
I remember waking up at night, finding bugs crawling on me. Then if I killed them, they'd leave reddish/brown patches of partially digested blood. They had bitten me all over. One night, my mom walked into my room since I left my lights on when I went to bed and saw all the bugs. She was aghast. I took "refuge" downstairs in the family room for a fcouple weeks until I could figure out what to do. I didn't even want to go into my room, and anytime I thought I felt something crawling on me while sleeping, I immediately jolted awake.
Thank god they didn't spread to the rest of the house. Exterminators wanted like $1000 to clean the two bedrooms. Think they wanted to do heat treatment, which has high potential to do wall and paint damage. And even then, there was no guarantee they'd be gone. Instead, my brother and I embarked on a deep clean operation. And also sprayed the hell out of our rooms and every surface with bedbug spray. We used so much insecticide. Literally all parts of furniture and beds were sprayed and wiped down. I had to throw away some small furniture that I noticed the bedbugs were "nesting" on. We bagged our beds with airtight, bedbug bags. And did a helluva lot of laundry, even of clean clothes.
Amazingly it all worked. But for about a month afterwards, I was still wary of sleeping my room. And still jolted awake if I "felt" something touch me while sleeping, even if nothing was there. I imagine it was PTSD. It still happens, but very rarely.
Unfortunately, I travel a lot for work and personal reasons, so my exposure is still probably high. And I live in an apartment, so who knows what other residents pick up.
I am sorry you had to go through that. It sounds terrible. I'm glad you were able to get rid of them by yourselves, but I would never recommend anyone do the same. If you have a good exterminator...
I am sorry you had to go through that. It sounds terrible. I'm glad you were able to get rid of them by yourselves, but I would never recommend anyone do the same. If you have a good exterminator that is using heat treatment and many other things then they should guarantee the job. I think it is surprising and disheartening to hear that you weren't offered such a guarantee. I paid at least $3-4k for treating a 2BR apartment and I do not regret a cent of it. The guys who did the job would come back for an additional treatment as part of what I paid them so long as I strictly followed their guidance. I mean, it was that level of confidence in their work that helped to dissipate some of the terrible emotions that were overwhelming my whole family at the time. I really wish those things would disappear off the earth forever.
I work in pest control and flinch a little every time I see this brought up. Bed bugs are already hard enough to get rid of. I really fear these new chemical resistant ones. I'm just bracing for...
I work in pest control and flinch a little every time I see this brought up. Bed bugs are already hard enough to get rid of. I really fear these new chemical resistant ones. I'm just bracing for the first phone call.
How do you treat the chemical resistant ones – heat treatment I guess? Is it effective (some people seem to suggest it's less effective than chemicals were for the non-chemical resistent ones)?
How do you treat the chemical resistant ones – heat treatment I guess? Is it effective (some people seem to suggest it's less effective than chemicals were for the non-chemical resistent ones)?
I was just talking to my boss about this. It's possible they are resistant to chemicals used in France. Hopefully what we have in the US will do the trick. If not, then it's heat treatments. Heat...
I was just talking to my boss about this. It's possible they are resistant to chemicals used in France. Hopefully what we have in the US will do the trick. If not, then it's heat treatments. Heat treatments can be tricky, for sure. You have to get to a pretty high temp for a decent amount of time for it to work, but it is effective.
I've wondered if it would be possible to build homes with a "pest purge" mode built right into them. For energy efficiency reasons, homes are being built with more and more insulation. At the same...
I've wondered if it would be possible to build homes with a "pest purge" mode built right into them. For energy efficiency reasons, homes are being built with more and more insulation. At the same time, it really doesn't require that high a temperature to kill bed bugs and their eggs. You don't need to heat a home up to boiling temperatures to kill them. A quick search suggests 113F will do it. So if a home was insulated enough, and you had a powerful enough furnace/heat pump, you could in principle relatively easily just heat the whole thing up to lethal bed bug temperatures at the push of a button. Heat the home and everything in it to lethal temperatures. Every bit of furniture. Every bit of the house from the rafters to the foundation, all slowly heated to lethal bedbugs temperatures, leaving the bastards nowhere to hide.
And the nice thing about bed bugs in particular, is that these again are relatively modest temperatures. Pretty much everything you can buy to furnish your home, all your electronics, all your furniture, all your decorations, can handle these temperatures. After all, a shipping container or a box truck sitting in the hot summer sun can easily reach these temperatures. Consumer goods need to be able to survive these temperatures, as they often need to survive them without damage during shipping. Something like roaches would be a lot harder, searching suggests it takes 150F to kill their eggs.
Discover you have bedbugs? Simple. Board the pets somewhere for a day. Set your house to pest purge mode, walk out, and go visit somewhere on a day trip. Come back to a home completely free from the bed bug menace.
That's a great idea in theory. I wonder what the costs would be in practice. I also wonder about whether a house would need to be tented/other heat escape prevention measures that would need to be...
That's a great idea in theory. I wonder what the costs would be in practice. I also wonder about whether a house would need to be tented/other heat escape prevention measures that would need to be taken and how effectively the general public can do them on their own and follow proper directions. Humans can't even follow proper directions on taking ibuprofen.
Sure, but that's why I suggested it would be more possible with the more highly insulated houses we're seeing today. Think about a home like a those built to the Passive House and other...
Sure, but that's why I suggested it would be more possible with the more highly insulated houses we're seeing today. Think about a home like a those built to the Passive House and other high-performance standards. I think in most existing houses, you would need some monstrously powerful and expensive heater to do such a thing. But more modern houses are being built with ever-higher levels of insulation and sealing.
After all, there's nothing magical about a tent, even a very expensive pest control one; it's just a well-insulated, well sealed, portable structure. As we chase ever-higher levels of building science and efficiency, every home may be built with that level of sealing.
One potential hangup might be that such highly efficient homes might not have heaters powerful enough to reach those high temps. Highly efficient heat pumps may not be capable of elevating homes to those temps. (Though maybe if you get your bedbug infestation in the middle of summer, when the outside temperature is already hot, this would be doable.) But even then, this would still be a great boon. You might have to bring in some powerful space heaters to heat up the home, but it wouldn't require any kind of special or expensive tenting, secondary sealing of windows, etc.
I actually DIY'd a small scale version of this myself. When we moved out to our current city, we first rented an apartment for awhile. And we got bed bugs in that apartment. And it was the Hell everyone describes it as. We were thankfully able to catch it pretty early (we think we brought them in from the hotel we stayed in the night before our flight out there.) We went through the whole pest control process, bagging and cleaning laundry, applying chemicals, the apartment complex brought in an exterminator, etc. So by the time we bought our house and were ready to leave the apartment, we were pretty sure the bedbugs were gone.
But I was taking ZERO chances. After going through that hell, I would be damned if I was going to let bed bugs get into the home we just bought. So I considered some options. We put down some preemptive chemical treatment just in case. But I put my DIY skills and engineering degree to work, designing and building my means of revenge. They weren't just a pest, this was personal. And they made the fatal mistake of pissing off and chronically sleep depriving someone who knows how to build things. And I built...THE BED BUG OVEN.
That ridiculous thing is a series of insulation panels, built on an insulated base, supported by a 2x4 framework. It was heated by placing space heaters inside. Internal box fans circulated the air further. Temperatures were monitored with temperature probes intended for kitchen use, with wires running through the panel edges.
The internal dimensions were 8'x4'x8' tall. In other words, big enough to fit boxes upon boxes and even our largest furniture. And we simply used that thing as an airlock. NOTHING entered the new house without first cooking in the bed bug oven first. Each run took many hours, but I did not care. I gave them nowhere to hide. I was going to take whatever time was needed to make sure every last one of those sons-of-bitches was dead and in the ground.
I'll admit, I was definitely going a bit crazy paranoid over this. But bed bugs really are that bad. It's a genuinely traumatic experience, and I was resolute that I would be damned if I let a single one of the bastards into our new home. They were probably already all dead before I even started building the oven, but I was taking no chances. I also admittedly took no small amount of glee in the idea of the little bastards being boiled alive in a hell that I built for them. This wasn't just about pest prevention. This was personal. This was revenge.
First of all, hugs, that's an absolutely traumatic experience and I don't wish that on anyone. Second, I see what you're saying, I'm just wondering how simple or difficult it could be to actually...
First of all, hugs, that's an absolutely traumatic experience and I don't wish that on anyone.
Second, I see what you're saying, I'm just wondering how simple or difficult it could be to actually make the homes airtight and/or how to make people actually follow the directions in general, not anything aimed at anyone in particular.
I really hope that you're doing better now that you're past the bed bugs. I obsessively check every inch of surface any time I travel anywhere, and have requested new rooms when I've thought that it looked even mildly suspect. I know so many people like that, and I haven't even had bed bugs before. My boss told me how her dead mom had a house absolutely infested with the little monsters and nothing she did could get them out of her mom's house before her mom died, and this was 10 years ago. I've been terrified of them since.
Don't think a lot of people who have won their war against them want to talk about them again. Lifelong trauma. Took a whole lot of joy out of life. No longer want to travel many places. Always got some part of me looking around for signs of their presence. Worst part is knowing there are people out there that can't call a professional and take care of them properly either out of ignorance, selfishness, lack of finances, their psychological situation, or maybe something else. Remediation is better than it was 10-15 years ago and if you get a professional in and follow their instructions you'll be ok, but it's real hell.
About 9yrs ago, my room at my parents then-house got infested by bed bugs. They then spread from my room to my younger brother's room, via our shared "Jack and Jill" bathroom. I think I picked them up while travelling within the US for work. It was a nightmare.
I remember waking up at night, finding bugs crawling on me. Then if I killed them, they'd leave reddish/brown patches of partially digested blood. They had bitten me all over. One night, my mom walked into my room since I left my lights on when I went to bed and saw all the bugs. She was aghast. I took "refuge" downstairs in the family room for a fcouple weeks until I could figure out what to do. I didn't even want to go into my room, and anytime I thought I felt something crawling on me while sleeping, I immediately jolted awake.
Thank god they didn't spread to the rest of the house. Exterminators wanted like $1000 to clean the two bedrooms. Think they wanted to do heat treatment, which has high potential to do wall and paint damage. And even then, there was no guarantee they'd be gone. Instead, my brother and I embarked on a deep clean operation. And also sprayed the hell out of our rooms and every surface with bedbug spray. We used so much insecticide. Literally all parts of furniture and beds were sprayed and wiped down. I had to throw away some small furniture that I noticed the bedbugs were "nesting" on. We bagged our beds with airtight, bedbug bags. And did a helluva lot of laundry, even of clean clothes.
Amazingly it all worked. But for about a month afterwards, I was still wary of sleeping my room. And still jolted awake if I "felt" something touch me while sleeping, even if nothing was there. I imagine it was PTSD. It still happens, but very rarely.
Unfortunately, I travel a lot for work and personal reasons, so my exposure is still probably high. And I live in an apartment, so who knows what other residents pick up.
I am sorry you had to go through that. It sounds terrible. I'm glad you were able to get rid of them by yourselves, but I would never recommend anyone do the same. If you have a good exterminator that is using heat treatment and many other things then they should guarantee the job. I think it is surprising and disheartening to hear that you weren't offered such a guarantee. I paid at least $3-4k for treating a 2BR apartment and I do not regret a cent of it. The guys who did the job would come back for an additional treatment as part of what I paid them so long as I strictly followed their guidance. I mean, it was that level of confidence in their work that helped to dissipate some of the terrible emotions that were overwhelming my whole family at the time. I really wish those things would disappear off the earth forever.
I work in pest control and flinch a little every time I see this brought up. Bed bugs are already hard enough to get rid of. I really fear these new chemical resistant ones. I'm just bracing for the first phone call.
How do you treat the chemical resistant ones – heat treatment I guess? Is it effective (some people seem to suggest it's less effective than chemicals were for the non-chemical resistent ones)?
I was just talking to my boss about this. It's possible they are resistant to chemicals used in France. Hopefully what we have in the US will do the trick. If not, then it's heat treatments. Heat treatments can be tricky, for sure. You have to get to a pretty high temp for a decent amount of time for it to work, but it is effective.
I've wondered if it would be possible to build homes with a "pest purge" mode built right into them. For energy efficiency reasons, homes are being built with more and more insulation. At the same time, it really doesn't require that high a temperature to kill bed bugs and their eggs. You don't need to heat a home up to boiling temperatures to kill them. A quick search suggests 113F will do it. So if a home was insulated enough, and you had a powerful enough furnace/heat pump, you could in principle relatively easily just heat the whole thing up to lethal bed bug temperatures at the push of a button. Heat the home and everything in it to lethal temperatures. Every bit of furniture. Every bit of the house from the rafters to the foundation, all slowly heated to lethal bedbugs temperatures, leaving the bastards nowhere to hide.
And the nice thing about bed bugs in particular, is that these again are relatively modest temperatures. Pretty much everything you can buy to furnish your home, all your electronics, all your furniture, all your decorations, can handle these temperatures. After all, a shipping container or a box truck sitting in the hot summer sun can easily reach these temperatures. Consumer goods need to be able to survive these temperatures, as they often need to survive them without damage during shipping. Something like roaches would be a lot harder, searching suggests it takes 150F to kill their eggs.
Discover you have bedbugs? Simple. Board the pets somewhere for a day. Set your house to pest purge mode, walk out, and go visit somewhere on a day trip. Come back to a home completely free from the bed bug menace.
That's a great idea in theory. I wonder what the costs would be in practice. I also wonder about whether a house would need to be tented/other heat escape prevention measures that would need to be taken and how effectively the general public can do them on their own and follow proper directions. Humans can't even follow proper directions on taking ibuprofen.
Sure, but that's why I suggested it would be more possible with the more highly insulated houses we're seeing today. Think about a home like a those built to the Passive House and other high-performance standards. I think in most existing houses, you would need some monstrously powerful and expensive heater to do such a thing. But more modern houses are being built with ever-higher levels of insulation and sealing.
After all, there's nothing magical about a tent, even a very expensive pest control one; it's just a well-insulated, well sealed, portable structure. As we chase ever-higher levels of building science and efficiency, every home may be built with that level of sealing.
One potential hangup might be that such highly efficient homes might not have heaters powerful enough to reach those high temps. Highly efficient heat pumps may not be capable of elevating homes to those temps. (Though maybe if you get your bedbug infestation in the middle of summer, when the outside temperature is already hot, this would be doable.) But even then, this would still be a great boon. You might have to bring in some powerful space heaters to heat up the home, but it wouldn't require any kind of special or expensive tenting, secondary sealing of windows, etc.
I actually DIY'd a small scale version of this myself. When we moved out to our current city, we first rented an apartment for awhile. And we got bed bugs in that apartment. And it was the Hell everyone describes it as. We were thankfully able to catch it pretty early (we think we brought them in from the hotel we stayed in the night before our flight out there.) We went through the whole pest control process, bagging and cleaning laundry, applying chemicals, the apartment complex brought in an exterminator, etc. So by the time we bought our house and were ready to leave the apartment, we were pretty sure the bedbugs were gone.
But I was taking ZERO chances. After going through that hell, I would be damned if I was going to let bed bugs get into the home we just bought. So I considered some options. We put down some preemptive chemical treatment just in case. But I put my DIY skills and engineering degree to work, designing and building my means of revenge. They weren't just a pest, this was personal. And they made the fatal mistake of pissing off and chronically sleep depriving someone who knows how to build things. And I built...THE BED BUG OVEN.
That ridiculous thing is a series of insulation panels, built on an insulated base, supported by a 2x4 framework. It was heated by placing space heaters inside. Internal box fans circulated the air further. Temperatures were monitored with temperature probes intended for kitchen use, with wires running through the panel edges.
The internal dimensions were 8'x4'x8' tall. In other words, big enough to fit boxes upon boxes and even our largest furniture. And we simply used that thing as an airlock. NOTHING entered the new house without first cooking in the bed bug oven first. Each run took many hours, but I did not care. I gave them nowhere to hide. I was going to take whatever time was needed to make sure every last one of those sons-of-bitches was dead and in the ground.
I'll admit, I was definitely going a bit crazy paranoid over this. But bed bugs really are that bad. It's a genuinely traumatic experience, and I was resolute that I would be damned if I let a single one of the bastards into our new home. They were probably already all dead before I even started building the oven, but I was taking no chances. I also admittedly took no small amount of glee in the idea of the little bastards being boiled alive in a hell that I built for them. This wasn't just about pest prevention. This was personal. This was revenge.
First of all, hugs, that's an absolutely traumatic experience and I don't wish that on anyone.
Second, I see what you're saying, I'm just wondering how simple or difficult it could be to actually make the homes airtight and/or how to make people actually follow the directions in general, not anything aimed at anyone in particular.
I really hope that you're doing better now that you're past the bed bugs. I obsessively check every inch of surface any time I travel anywhere, and have requested new rooms when I've thought that it looked even mildly suspect. I know so many people like that, and I haven't even had bed bugs before. My boss told me how her dead mom had a house absolutely infested with the little monsters and nothing she did could get them out of her mom's house before her mom died, and this was 10 years ago. I've been terrified of them since.
Unfortunately paywalled. I was unable to read this in full but I'm very interested.
This is an archive link.