Conquer Your Bed Bugs With Professional Help

Bed bugs are not something to mess around with. They are difficult to kill off, so you'll get the best results if you call in an exterminator rather than try DIY methods of pest control. Bed bugs are different from other household insects because they feed on your blood. They actually hunt you down while you're sleeping, and bite your skin, which causes painful, itchy welts. Just as you wouldn't want to expose yourself to hoards of hungry mosquitoes at night, you don't want to let bed bugs bite you and leave you in misery. Here's what you can do to get rid of them.

Deep Clean Your Bedroom

If you haven't tried to escape the bugs by sleeping on your living room couch, there's a good chance they are confined to your bedroom. The bugs set up camp close to where their food source is, so they are likely to be concentrated around your bed. The first step to getting rid of the bugs is to clean up your room. You should do this even if you plan to call in a professional exterminator. Crumples in paper and folds in clothing offer protective harbors where bed bug treatments may not reach.

Clear out all the clutter in your room by throwing as much of it in the trash as possible. Put things you want to save in plastic bags and seal them shut so bugs can't crawl out. This includes your clothing, stuffed animals, pillows, and other loose items in the room. Next, give the room a deep vacuum. This will suck up a lot of the bugs that are hiding in chair seams and deep in your carpet. Run the vacuum wand along baseboards and wall paper seams too. Spend a lot of time on your bed, and work the wand into all the tiny crevices in the mattress, box springs, and bed frame.

Kill Bugs With Heat

If you don't have a lot of bagged clothing and other items, you may be able to kill the bugs inside them yourself with heat. Wash your clothes with hot water or simply run them through the dryer using high heat. If your dryer has a shelf that keeps things from tumbling, you can put shoes, figurines, and other things in the dryer too, as long as they can withstand the heat. Some things are too big or unsuitable for a dryer. Try placing those bagged items inside your car. Park the car in full sun for the day so it heats up inside.

If you have a lot of bagged possessions, or if you want to make absolutely sure every bug is killed, then let the bed bug exterminators heat treat the room. They can raise the temperature in your bedroom high enough to kill the bugs, or they can transport your belongings to a heated treatment chamber.

Professional Treatments

A pest control professional will offer the best advice for getting rid of the bugs based on the severity of your infestation. If the bugs are throughout your house, your entire home may need to be heat treated. If you only have a few bugs, the exterminator may get results with insecticides alone. One reason you need professional help is because insecticides you buy at the store are not effective against bed bugs. The bugs built up a tolerance to a lot of insecticides a long time ago, and that's why they are such a nuisance now. It takes professional-grade chemicals to get rid of them.

Another reason to hire a professional is for quicker results. It could take forever to run all your things through a household dryer and an exterminator can do it in a single day by using a heat treatment. One thing is for sure, if you have bed bugs, you want to get rid of them in a hurry. They'll disrupt your sleep, cover you with ugly bite marks, and leave you itchy and miserable. You can waste time trying DIY methods of pest control that probably won't work very well considering how well the bugs can hide and how long they can go without eating. If you call a bed bug exterminator early in the infestation, the bugs will be easier to get rid of, and you can save yourself a lot of grief.

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