When bed bugs move into a house, they will quickly move between rooms and spread much further than just your bed. Bed bugs can live on a lot of the furniture and belongings around your home, including chairs, sofas, rugs, clothing, curtains, and more. Bed bugs are also notoriously hard to kill.
This leaves many homeowners with the misconception that when they want to eliminate bedbugs, they have to get rid of any item that might be infested. In reality, almost every one of your belongings can be saved with the right tools, equipment, and a little bit of effort on your part. Here are some of the ways you can remove bed bugs from your possessions after an infestation without risking the bedbugs returning.
How to Remove Bed Bugs from Belongings
It is still important to seek professional bed bug control if you have these pests in your home. Bed bugs are good hiders and difficult to eliminate if you do not remove every last bug from the property. Attempting to do so solely on your own is almost always ineffective. But taking steps to clean your belongings can both help the extermination process and ensure you do not have to throw out your stuff.
The easiest and most effective way to kill bed bugs is with temperature. Bed bugs can survive for months without food and are resistant to many pesticides used to treat them. Extreme heat or extreme cold will always work when bedbugs are exposed for long enough.
Depending on what items you were trying to gain, use one of the following methods:
- Laundry – Wash and dry any items that can be safely laundered on the highest heat settings available on your washing machine and dryer. This should kill any bugs and eggs that are hiding in the folds of clothes, bedding, curtains, and stuffed animals. If you have clothing that is dry clean only, you can use the dryer for 30 minutes on high heat to help remove bed bugs.
- Steam Cleaning – Commercial steam cleaners produce steam hot enough to kill bed bugs on exposure. This steam can also penetrate beneath the surface of fabric and up to two inches into crevices around your home such as between walls and baseboards or in the corners of a box spring. Use steam above 130 degrees Fahrenheit to be effective, but not above 160 degrees and not on any services that could be damaged by water.
- Professional Bed Bed Temperature Treatment – Many bed bug control companies will use insecticide based treatments on areas where bed bugs are present. But it is understandable to not want these treatments on your clothing, bedding, toys and other items, and they are not always sufficient. Temperature treatments are the newest way to remove bed bugs. A bed bug heat treatment uses special heating fans to raise the temperature of individual rooms in your house to well over what bed bugs can withstand. Freezing treatments are a state of the art technology that uses a special nozzle to direct freezing CO2 into any area bed bugs are hiding. Because these treatments do not use water or chemicals they are safe to use all of your belongings to completely remove bedbugs
Having a bed bug infestation at your home can feel like an immense hassle. But if you are worried about the cost of replacing infested items, ADAPT Pest Management can help you get rid of bed bugs in Rocklin, Roseville, and beyond while saving as many of your belongings as possible. Call us today to find out more about our advanced bed bug treatments.
