Adventures with(out?) Bedbugs: A year-plus later

A year or so ago, we had a bedbug infestation in our home.  Here are the previous episodes of that Epic Adventure Story, gathered:

1. Discovery and Naiveté
2. Dracaris, the Heat Gun
3. Professional Options
4. The Incinerator
5. Ozymandius (the last bedbug)

The very very short summary is that we had no idea what we were doing at the beginning, we tried a bunch of different things, and we landed on killing them with special heaters we ordered for $1000, following up with an $800 professional poison treatment that may or may not have been necessary. 

"The Incinerator" (our name), officially called "the Cube".
This picture makes the fan and heater look bigger than they are because
Prewash is so far back; they're about 24" high.

After our Incinerator/Cube heat treatment of the house, we've been bedbug-free with the exception of that last desperate crawl of Ozymandius, the Defiant BedBug, up my bedroom wall.

That is, we were bedbug free until May, when my husband woke me at 4 a.m. one morning to say he saw bugs in his bed.  And indeed, they weren't just any old bugs; they were bedbugs.  Dang it.

Given that this was May and Ozmandius had disappeared the previous August, I don't think that this was the same population, hiding out and waiting to spring forth again. No, I think this was a new infestation. And in talking to our friends, we get the sense that bedbugs really are more common than we'd like to think. 

The stories our friends tell make for some good (if skin-crawling) coffee-time discussions.  Andrea noted that whenever people talk about having bedbugs, they start to lower their voices or even whisper: "we have  . . . bedbugs."  Dan talked about being in Costa Rica, and pouring boiling water on his mattress to try to keep the population low.  Sarah's kids brought home bedbugs from summer camp; she responded by burning their bunkbed, putting diatomaceous earth all over the floor of that room, and sealing the room up for an entire month.  She said she was fortunate the kids didn't have a lot of furniture in there for the bugs to snuggle their way into.  

In our case, this past May we now knew what we were doing, and we already had The Incinerator. Despite the impressive name we give it, this cube really just gently heats a space up to somewhere between 120° and 130° F. Bedbugs die at temperatures above 115° to 120° F, although they have to be kept there for a while, the same way it takes a while for a person to die of heat stroke or hypothermia.  So when my husband noticed the bugs, we hauled out The Incinerator, plugged it in to three different circuit breakers in the house, opened up the closets and drawers to let the heat in there, closed off the room, and went about our daily business. We repeated the day-long heat treatment two days later, just to be sure. I'm delighted to say, the bedbugs are gone.  Murdered in our beds, so to speak. 

This Round Two experience was by no means pleasant;  I think both of us had a bit of insomnia and anxiety at the time about the beasties in our home. On the other hand, it was reassuring to know that we knew what we were doing, and it felt positively triumphant to be able to get rid of these guys in just three days. Bam!

We had talked about selling off the Cube after our first bedbug experience, but now we're determined to hang on to it, both so that we can sleep easier through the night and also so that we can share this amazing  contraption with friends if they ever find themselves in a similar predicament.