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Getting rid of bed bugs: trickier than ever
- latchkey 3y agoI really enjoyed this all about bed bugs video on YT by Mark Rober. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JAOTJxYqh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JAOTJxYqh8
- ForestCritter 3y agoLA's Totally Awesome carpet cleaner from the dollar tree. I was holding a bottle trying to get a stain out of my daughter's bedding and saw one. I was so mad by then I sprayed at the sucker and it instantly keeled over. No clue what's in the stuff but it saved my sanity.
- bruce343434 3y agoPersonally I've had great difficulty getting rid of Silverfishes. Despite plugging all crevices with diatomaceous sand, making sure indoor temperature does not exceed 18°C, removing any specimen on sight, I still encounter one every now and then just chilling on the wall or floor. They've eaten my underfloor isolation (the floor sags at those spots now), but other than that they're harmless - I can't imagine the horror if they snuck into my bed and bit me in my sleep. I would seriously consider throwing everything away and starting anew.
- generic92034 3y agoI believe humans are not part of their diet. ;) But they can process cellulose, starch and even mold, can survive months without any food, so it is next to impossible to starve them. Low room temperature and low humidity might help a bit.
- andrewl 3y agobruce343434 isn’t saying he’s worried the silverfish will sneak into his bed and bite him in his sleep. He’s saying it would be horrifying to live with insects as stealthy and difficult to eradicate as silverfish, but which were also bloodsuckers, like bedbugs. In short, he’s saying bedbugs are horrifying.
- roncesvalles 3y agoJust spray permethrin and be done with it. It's the only thing that works and if you spray in all the right places, one round of spraying fixes it forever. Source: about 15 years of fighting silverfish, until someone suggested permethrin on Reddit
- roncesvalles 3y agoNOTE: Wikipedia says it's toxic to cats
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoYou need (perhaps multiple) dehumidifiers. Keep at 40-45% rel.hum. and silverfish will disappear. Don't keep food unsealed (looking at you: unwashed dishwear) and cockroaches will disappear. Have neither and centipedes will disappear. ---- No advice for bedbugs other than Diatomacious Earth and not bringing in used furniture / houseguests.
- tiltowait 3y agoI worked pest control for a few years until 2021. We all knew that pesticides basically don’t work on bed bugs—it was old news. The article glosses over heat treatments, which is odd, because it really does work, and usually in a single session. It’s a very labor-intensive and invasive procedure, though. The residents must leave the house for 8 hours while the techs bake each room and throw everything around. By the time it’s over, it looks like a tornado went through the house. And our prices started at $5k. But it did work. The only two scenarios I was aware of where it didn’t were the result of operator error (laziness) or the customer unknowingly taking bed bugs out of the house with them when they left (we found the bed bugs were living in a baseball cap).
- Gys 3y agoI read once they get into beds by crawling up the bedposts and by putting something smooth like aluminum cups around the posts, the bugs cannot crawl up. What do you think of that?
- sdwr 3y agoI'd assume that works for local bedbugs, but is no defense against ones tracked in on clothing, furniture, etc.
- philihp 3y agoNot much can stop a lone bedbug carried in. What you're trying to do is prevent your mattress from becoming a nest. The problem with DE is it's so inexpensive and effective, and that makes it difficult to sell as a product. I got a 2kg bag of it for $10, and it's enough to last decades.
- lm28469 3y agoMight as well use this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatomaceous_earth https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatomaceous_earth
- 3y ago
- weatherlight 3y agoWe had a house centipede infestation when I lived in NYC. It was awesome. No bed bugs. No roaches except in the end of summer, (the giant flying variety and it was really just the month of August when the humidity is out of control they would come out of the drains.) No bugs in general. Those house centipedes ate everything.
- hotpotamus 3y agoI once awoke to see a large spider running away from me on my bed. I was a bit displeased with that until I learned that they hunt roaches. I figured if it was running away from me, then it figured (perhaps incorrectly) that I was not to be messed with and so the food chain in my house remained as it should be.
- prewett 3y agoI think it is always correct to run away from something 100 times bigger than you!
- greggsy 3y agoThey would be 1.7cm long if they were 100 time smaller than the average human. Seems to check out. I’m glad you weren’t referring to weight. The average human weighs 60-80kg, depending on what region you’re in. The heaviest spider is the Goliath, grows up to 13cm, but only weighs up to 135grams…
- mikub 3y agoYou mean the food chain remained intact as long as you're awake. ;)
- zem 3y agothe real danger is not the spider eating you but vice versa! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiders_Georg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiders_Georg
- RajT88 3y ago
- chasil 3y agoEven the best hotels have dealt with bedbugs. For safety, leave your luggage in your car for a few days when you return from a trip. Ideally, you want the temperature to either drop below freezing or rise above 100°F, which will kill bedbugs. The same procedure should be employed with used furniture, perhaps more aggressively. There is also a trick with dry ice and talcum powder if you think an infestation is starting and you want to confirm. If I had never bought rental property, I would never have known any of this. I am relieved to have sold it all. EDIT: The article says 120°F.
- wcarss 3y agoIIRC, below freezing also isn't generally good enough -- I forget what the specifics are from when I cared a lot about it 5+ years ago, but it's something like -20C consistently for a few whole days for all the stages of bedbug and their eggs to be destroyed by cold. They're surprisingly resistant to death from cold -- but a good hot dryer at 120F for ~30+ minutes will definitely get 'em.
- idlewords 3y agoThis exactly. Freezing is useless unless you have something like a lab freezer that gets to -50C. Hot dryer for clothes, and you can put empty luggage in a dark trash bag and leave it in the sun to heat treat.
- whitepoplar 3y agoHaving run the bedbug site, what's your advice on long-term travel? I've never gotten bedbugs, but I feel it's only a matter of time. How do you balance prevention with simply living your life?
- dirtyhippiefree 3y agoHeat treatment is the only sure way to eradicate bedbugs. A neighbor fumigated five times and they still remained…until heat treatment. Diatomaceous earth just scatters them, compounding the problem.
- hinkley 3y agoFreezers also work don’t they? Might come a day when a defunct restaurant gets acquired by a pest control company and used to freeze items too expensive or dear to replace. But they’d have to use one truck for pickup and one for drop off to prevent cross contamination.
- beej71 3y ago> Diatomaceous earth just scatters them I'm pretty sure that's not all it does to them. When I had bedbugs in an apartment I was renting, I caulked up all the spaces by the baseboards where they could get in, inspected the bed and wrapped it in a bedbug-proof liner, washed and thoroughly dryered all the linens and pillows, and then spread DE all over. I put lids under the bedposts with DE in them. And I moved the bed away from the wall. That was the end of them. Didn't get another bite.
- dirtyhippiefree 3y agoHow long has it been since then?
- beej71 3y agoI lived in that apartment for about a year after that.
- juujian 3y agoI was talking a friend in China about bed bugs recently. They said there is a medicine people take which makes our blood poisonous to them. Ironically enough, it's ivermectine... Makes sense I suppose, it targets parasites and bed bugs are a parasite. I read some papers about it, too. Doesn't seem to be a panacea but potentially useful in combination with traditional pest control.
- readthenotes1 3y agoHow is that ironic? It's primary use in humans is versus parasites. It's a godsend against scabies... (Which I had at the beginning of the pandemic, my doctor casually mentioning "it also has known anti-viral properties")
- hinkley 3y agoI know someone who is using it topically for rosacea. I guess some forms at least are a reaction to mites. So bye bye mites.
- MOARDONGZPLZ 3y agoI don’t think ironic is _quite_ right, but it does mean paradoxical, and it’s somewhat paradoxical that ivermectin is being effectively used in humans here for bedbug treatment when you consider the juxtaposition against the far right wing conspiracy theories that it would cure covid in humans but instead only harmed people.
- readthenotes1 3y agoIvermectin is one of the safest drugs out there. You have to really abuse it to have any troubles unless you have a bad liver. I find your assertion that it only harms people curious given that the studies that I saw showed that it actually helped quite a bit in third world countries. Of course, those people may have been infested with parasites and cleaning that up may have helped them overcome covid as well
- jp57 3y agoThe obvious answer is centipedes. If you are going to have to tolerate any kind of bug in your house, Scutigera Coleoptrata, the common house centipede, is the one to have. These creepy, long-legged brown centipedes were familiar to everyone I knew growing up in the northeastern US. They are shy of people and tend to stay in the basement at night and only come out at night when it's dark, cool, and quiet (increasing their creepiness). The upside? They eat other bugs, including many pests like termites, cockroaches, and bedbugs.
- koolba 3y agoIf you have centipedes in your house then de facto you have other bugs. They’re strictly carnivores. So as cool and helpful as they are, their continued existence indicates you have other problems as well. Best to consider them like Sully in the movie Commando: “I like you. I’m gonna kill you last.”
- _dark_matter_ 3y agoHow is it possible to have a house with no insects? I just don't even see that as feasible, except maybe for a small new house with no shrubbery (and probably in a desert environment?). There ain't no way you're living in a house with zero bugs.
- koolba 3y agoI’m not saying there can be zero bugs. I’m saying if you regularly find centipedes, then there’s enough other bugs to sustain them. They don’t just go outside to hit up a local cafe then come back home after. Plus, they can live for 5-6 years. The bigger they are, the longer they’ve been there too.
- zeroonetwothree 3y agoI won’t say I have zero but it’s very few. I can go weeks without seeing an insect indoors.
- xerox13ster 3y ago
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- cassepipe 3y agoIf you ever have bed bugs, do yourself a favor and buy water vapor gun, with a large tank. Adults and larvae die at 60 degrees so vapor is like the nuclear option to them. Also it's non-toxic to you, it doesn't stain and the vapor can penetrate anything anywhere. For example : https://www.kaercher.com/fr/home-garden/nettoyeurs-vapeur/sc-3-easyfix-15136500.html https://www.kaercher.com/fr/home-garden/nettoyeurs-vapeur/sc...
- ametrau 3y agoDo you mean steam? The link is to a steam cleaner. That’s a cool idea.
- spcebar 3y agoI think this is a funny case of a false cognate. Vapeur is the French word for steam. Vapeur sounds like vapor, and steam is a vapor. So a steam gun is still sort of a vapor gun, but it's definitely a vapeur gun.
- jbaber 3y agoEven in French, it doesn't call it a gun. But I like this name. I'm calling my steam cleaner a "vapor gun" from now on. :)
- 123pie123 3y agomark rober did a good entertaining video on this, including the various tricks how to get rid of them (and what does not work) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JAOTJxYqh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JAOTJxYqh8
- haltcatchfire 3y agoMark is such a gem.
- ndiddy 3y agoAnother entertaining bed bug video: https://vimeo.com/57254558 https://vimeo.com/57254558
- DrFell 3y agoI had a bedbug problem in a place I rented. The landlord used heat, and it seemed to work. I also just used common sense and got a mattress liner and used Permethrin around the perimeter of my room, and it cleared up.
- deafpolygon 3y agoI would nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
- sebastiangula 3y agoY
- TacticalCoder 3y agoI saw a company selling bed feet with a trap catching bed bugs. It was using glue IIRC. I remember it looking like this (side view of one foot): | <- bed lays on top of the feet | | | | | | | | | | | | ----|---| <- glue here | | <- this part touches the ground The idea was that there was no way up to the bed for the bedbugs without getting stuck in glue. It's not unlike the traps for big wasps, to prevent them from attacking bees. Now of course it only works if the bed is on feet. It basically prevents them from climbing up to the humans as they get stuck in the feet. What I noticed is bed bugs hate: zen rooms with no furniture besides the bed (very little place to hide, besides the mattress) and brand new paint. Had bed bugs once, in room: treated the room with chemicals, moved the bed off the wall for a few days, repainted the room, vaccuum cleaned (with a very strong vaccum cleaner) the mattress... It worked but YMMV.
- ThinkBeat 3y agoClearly this can be solved with AI and tiny drones with lasers, rail guns, and flamethrowers. Or maybe the drones can jump on top of and envelop the bug, toasting it in a second. Apparently, ants, cockroaches and centipedes eat bed bug. None of those seem great to have around the house in great numbers. Lizards (at least some) also eat bed bugs. Perhaps someone could rent out lizards. Would one week be sufficient time for the lizardst to eat them all?
- AlexAndScripts 3y agoI'm disappointed that nobody had made a mosquito CIWS yet. Has anyone tried making something based on a grid of speakers and constructive interference?
- lamontcg 3y ago> Perhaps someone could rent out lizards. gig working app for lizards. disrupt the reptile economy. fund me.
- Alifatisk 3y agoThe solution is diatomaceous earth, I wish I knew this earlier.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]