Should You Sleep Somewhere Else During Bedbug Treatment in Bexley?

When people find bedbugs, the first thing many of them do is move: to the sofa, to the spare room, to a sister’s house for a fortnight. It feels like cutting the problem off. What it usually does is give the bedbugs a second address.

Why Bedbugs Follow You

Bedbugs stay near their food, and their food is the person in the bed. Take the person away and the hungry ones do not sit and wait politely. They start moving, along the skirting, under doors and into the next room, looking for someone to feed on.

Some of them go with you. They travel in the pyjamas, the pillow, the dressing gown and the bag you packed in a hurry. So a household that moves one person onto the sofa often ends up with two treated rooms instead of one, and a family that goes to stay with relatives can take the problem to a second house.

Staying Put Actually Helps the Treatment

With chemical treatment, a residual insecticide goes into the seams, frames and skirtings, and it keeps working after we leave. It only works on bugs that walk across it. A person sleeping in that bed keeps drawing the survivors and the newly hatched ones out across the treated surfaces, which is what the treatment relies on between visits.

Heat treatment is different. It kills the bugs and eggs in the room on the day, and nothing is left behind afterwards, so once the room has cooled you go back to sleeping there that night. There is no reason to stay away afterwards.

When Staying Away Is Sensible

There are times when sleeping somewhere else is the right call, and we will say so when it is:

• During a heat treatment itself, when everyone, including pets, is out of the room for most of a day.
• For the few hours after a chemical visit, until the treated surfaces are dry.
• When someone in the house has a skin reaction bad enough that a pharmacist or GP has advised it.
• When we have advised that a piece of furniture is not worth treating and it has gone, and a replacement is not yet in.

In each case the stay is short and planned, rather than an open-ended move while the problem carries on at home. Anyone with signs of a severe allergic reaction should call 999.

If You Do Have to Go, What to Take

1. Pack from clean laundry that has been through a hot wash or the dryer, not from the bedroom floor or wardrobe.
2. Use a hard-sided bag if you have one, and check its seams before you pack.
3. Leave pillows, duvets, soft toys and anything from the affected bed at home.
4. When you arrive, keep the bag off the bed and away from the sofa.
5. When you come back, wash the clothes you took before they go back in a drawer.

If you are going to family, tell them. It is not a comfortable conversation, but it is much easier than the one after they find bites. Our guide on when a visitor brings bedbugs covers that situation from the other side.

What About the Children?

It is tempting to move a bitten child into a parent’s bed or a sibling’s room. It is the same mistake at a smaller scale. Keeping each child in their own bed, with clean bedding, keeps the problem to the room it started in, and that keeps the treatment smaller. The Bexleyheath page covers stopping it reaching the other bedrooms, and the chemical treatment page explains what happens between visits.

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