Monday, August 24, 2020

Adventures with Bedbugs, Episode 4

Here are some things I keep reminding myself about the bedbug ordeal we're muddling through.

  1. I haven't seen any real evidence anywhere of long-term side-effects of these animalitos.  There's all sort of evidence that, although they are very, very (very) tough to get rid of, but also a kind of general mantra that people working with professional exterminators eventually do get rid of them.  I repeat to myself, "A year from now, we won't have bedbugs; this is temporary".  
    (I know that's not a guarantee, but it is a likelihood, so I'm sticking to this mantra).
  2. If all of my DIY attempts fail, I can fall back on professional exterminators.  I don't want to, but if I can't get rid of the bedbugs on my own terms, at least I have back-up plans.
  3. Everything I learn is actually kind of interesting.  There's ways in which this is like a big experiment, or a big story.  It's not at all fun having bedbugs, but sharing the experience of having bedbugs is kind of cathartic.  
And so, with that forward (and maybe even with that foreshadowing . . . .), let us return to where we were last week with our bedbug saga.

 Between 

  • hypo-allergenic mattress covers protecting our beds (and, heck, while we're at it, the sofa),
  • diatomaceous earth decorating the floors of my bedroom and a few other choice spots in the house,
  • nightly hunting expeditions with my trusty flashlight, and 
  • my beloved sidekick, Dracaris-The-Heat Gun,
we had managed to reduce bedbug populations dramatically.  During the week leading up to last Friday, I had only managed to find something like two dead bedbugs (on the bathroom floor: why?) and one live-but-extremely lethargic one (in Prewash's dog bed, which gets toasted daily).

But to deliver the final death blow to these invaders, on Friday we brought in . . . 
The Incinerator.

We'd had a choice between buying a $1300 version that promised to be able handle 200 square feet, and a larger $2400 one that could cover a bigger room; we went with the smaller one, because our bedrooms and other second floor rooms all fit the size requirement.  

Buying a $1300 professional bedbug heater sounds like a dramatic and even perilous step. Certainly, in my head, this was a piece of equipment that would dwarf the household furnace, requiring incredible space to store and patient expertise to learn to use properly, and even then, using it would risk burning down the house (which would probably get rid of the bed bugs, but would not necessarily solve the problem of getting a good night's sleep).   

So when it arrived, I was incredibly relieved to see this, instead.


Removed from the boxes, "The Cube" is even more innocuous looking, sitting next to its buddy "Cube Blower".   Perhaps they both want to be friends with R2D2 someday.

It comes with a helpful set of directions saying, in red type, "For Professional use only".   Even the quotation marks are in red, which frankly makes the warning sound more wink-wink-nod-nod than anything else.  I kinda love the directions.  Here is my favorite line, which I reproduce with capitalization and punctuation exactly as it appears in the brochure.  

Remove all Animals (dog cats, fish, turtles, mice, snakes, hamster's, etc.)

The rest of the directions say (in summary) that you have to seal up the room, but don't move furniture around too much.  You need to have the separate blower on while you run the heater, to circulate air in the room.  And then to operate the heater itself, you have to follow this tricky set of steps:
  1. Plug it in.
  2. Turn it on.
  3. Leave it on for "at least 6 hours" until the room gets up to temp.
To be a bit more realistic, each step is a tad harder than it sounds.  
  1. As for "plugging it in", the heater actually comes with three (3) cords, and each of these has to be connected to a three-pronged outlet on three different circuit breakers, which is probably where the "For Professional use only" caution comes in.  (The heater draws something like 36 amps, 12 through each cord.)   I found three such outlets by using fancy equipment called "lamps" which I plugged into various outlets around the home, and then turned on and off circuit breakers in the basement, carefully labeling them for future reference.      
  2. As for "turning it on", there are two switches.  You first turn on the the fan-within-the-heater (in addition to having the separate blower running), and then turn on the heating element.  If you don't remember to turn on the heating element, then . . . you come back an hour later and find a noisy room that isn't particularly warm.  And then you can turn on the heating element and watch the thermostat rise slowly to 130 degrees, where you bake the room for 6 hours, and then move the whole set-up to the next room for at least another 6 hours.
So, I sealed up the bedroom, and I removed the dog cats and the snakes, together with the hamster's etc, and then I turned The Incinerator on, and left, checking every couple of hours on the progress.

3.  The fans are a bit noisy.   The directions say that we ought to keep the Cube running for a minimum of 6 hours, and that the temperature rises slowly.  "Slowly" is not an exaggeration; my fears of burning down the house turned at some point into fears that maybe we'd gotten a defective machine.  The machine is rated for rooms of up to 200 square feet; my bedroom is close to that (but with 9-foot, not 8-foot ceilings, making the volume larger), and it took an agonizing 8 hours before the temperature topped the magic 123 degrees (bedbug killing temperature), and inched up toward 130.    
 
There's a bit of technique in arranging the blower and the fan appropriately (that might be part of the professional use caveat.  It's really agonizing to have this heater on for 8 hours overnight, and see that the thermostat is still reading only 119 degrees.   Rearranging where the fan and blower were helped . . . but what I thought would take 18 hours, to heat up three rooms in sequence, ended up lasting all weekend long and then a bit.

A room that is 130 degrees is hot, but not burn-down-the-house hot.  (It keeps reminding me that in 2009, my husband was off in Iraq, where he regularly worked outside in 130-degree temperatures, and he's still, y'know, fine.)   But these guys draw a LOT of energy.  

And they do make the rooms very warm, even a day or so after.  

And I'd love to say that this particular experiment has been a resounding success.  

But . . . 

The night that I was heating my bedroom, I couldn't sleep there obviously, and I also didn't want to sleep in the next room over, because of the incredible noise  So I grabbed my sleeping bag and headed for the dining room, about as far away from my bedroom as you can get in the house.  In the middle of the night, I found a beddog in my sleeping bag with me.   That wasn't so bad, though.


But closer to morning, my beddog and I were joined by a pair of bedbugs.  Sigh.  The incinerator is definitely not large enough to handle the spacious rooms on the first floor.   I decided to continue with the experiment on the second floor, and just Dracaris the heck out of everything I could reach on the first floor.  We've already removed most soft stuff from that level, so although I knew it was a long-shot, I was willing to gamble.

But then.   But then I went up to the bedroom for something -- the bedroom that a mere 36 hours earlier had been though an Incinerator heat treatment.  And I saw a spot on the ceiling.  I got my step stool and flashlight from the other room, and came back to check . . .  and sure enough, that spot was a bedbug.  Alive. On my ceiling.

[As a minor aside, isn't amazing that bedbugs don't really run away like other insects?  It just waited for me to come back, identify, and murder it.  So very patient, the bedbug is.]

. .  .
 
And so I give up.  I'm not DIY-ing this anymore.  I called our local exterminators, and set up an appointment for early next week.  We're going to pack up all our (laundered, heated-in-the-dryer) clothes, stuff them into (shudder) plastic bags, and figure out how to leave the house for 6 hours, dog and all.  They're going to come spray the house with poison.  I'm going to cross fingers that my particular strain of bedbugs haven't developed a resistance to this particular strain of insecticide, and also that living in a row house doesn't mean that my neighbors and I start sharing animals back and forth.  

By the way, I am still extremely (extremely) fond of my heat gun.  I now think that diatomaceous earth is vastly overrated.  And that's where our bedbug situation stands as of Monday night.

11 comments:

  1. Argh I was really hoping this was the one where you got em all, DIY style. Really hoping the exterminator gets them all in one go, though.

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    1. Me, too! (Hoping I could have done it myself, that is).

      The exterminator actually needs 3 goes, not just one: the poison gets the adults, but not the eggs.

      And just to moderate the expectations even more, the typical time to complete eradication is something like 12 weeks, says one place I read (National Geographic? I can't remember). So we're just at the beginning, one month in.

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    2. You have all my sympathies. We once had a plague of fleas for five months, courtesy of my parents' dog. We don't even have any pets! In the fifth month I finally bought eight canisters of the good poison and bombed the whole house.

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    3. Ooogh . . . fleas. My mom developed allergies -- even one flea bite, and all her old bites flared up again. We bombed the house every three years, I think. We got good at it, unfortunately.

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  2. I am finding your bedbug adventures interesting from a scientific perspective, but I'm sorry you're going through it. It gives me some perspective on the ant infestation we are having trouble shaking in the kitchen. About a week ago we thought we had licked them, but then one careless night of leaving something tempting out (maybe a glass that had contained lemonade, maybe the uncovered compost, something like that) and they were back, darn it! I hope the exterminators do the trick for you.

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    1. (The compost is just the little container we have on the counter and fill up to take to the outside compost pile.)

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    2. Yeah, I think bedbugs are even more gripping (and exciting) to write about than plastic. And although bedbugs are harder to get rid of, I *hate* having ants, even more. In our previous house, which was particularly ant prone, we had an exterminator on retainer, who would come by every three months. I'm not sure why I'm resisting bedbug poison so much when I used to do ant poison with the change of every season.

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    3. If you ever decide you want to poison your ants, the Advion gel works a treat; we put it out behind the microwave where children can't reach it. I live in the South and we have periodic infestations of thousands and thousands of indoor ants.

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    4. JF Scientist, thanks for the suggestion. Our new (to us) home has not been infested so far; our best guess is that the radiant heat under a bedroom that had previously served as a garage (e.g., right on the dirt) served as a warm and welcome invitation for ants to make our home their party place, over and over again.

      I am VERY glad to have advice in case somehow the old ants tell our new ants that we're potential party hosts.

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  3. Bedbugs are the worst. I found lice to be not so bad (a few weeks of diligent combing cured my kids, tho I think I caught it really early). But my parents had bedbugs from some renters. The bedbugs had invaded the whole house. My mom and brother had to serve as bait (as you may have learned, leaving a room empty doesn't help as the bedbugs will just wait patiently for humans). Thankfully, the house was fairly empty -- they were putting it on the market. They left their clothes in the garage and did a lot of laundry. They also used an exterminator, but it still took quite a long time to cure.

    You've now got me nervous, as I get plenty of books from both the library and little free libraries. Fingers crossed that this was a weird fluke for you.

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    1. I actually thought lice were worse than bedbugs . . . yeeschkkh for carrying bugs around on my body! But I know that lots of people have a very different experience than me. Maybe the lice warmed me up for this, so I was psychologically more resilient? I dunno.

      As you'll see in Episode 5, we have fingers crossed that we're making good headway. (ooh, and I wouldn't say "headway" if they were lice!)

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