Bedbug Heat Treatment Bromley

How Heat Fits a Bigger House

Across much of the borough the homes are houses rather than flats: Victorian and Edwardian terraces and semis in Beckenham and Penge, large detached houses in Chislehurst, and the 1920s and 30s houses of Petts Wood. Heat treatment copes with all of them. What changes from house to house is how much air and how many contents have to be brought up to a temperature bedbugs cannot survive, and how many rooms need it.

The method, the kit and the reason it gets the eggs are all on our London heat treatment page, for the full explanation. Here we stick to what a larger Bromley home adds.

Large Rooms and High Ceilings

A big bedroom is not harder to treat, but it is slower. There is more volume to warm, and older houses with tall ceilings hold a band of warm air near the top while the floor and the skirtings lag behind. The fans are there to keep the air moving so the lower edges of the room, where bedbugs actually live, catch up with the rest.

Contents matter as much as floor area. A room with a fitted wardrobe packed with clothes, a blanket box and a tall chest of drawers takes longer to bring through than an emptier room of the same size, because every folded layer has to heat right the way through. We check the dense spots with the thermal camera before the room is signed off, and a full room simply takes more of the day.

Things that help: open wardrobe doors and drawers a little, pull the bed an inch or two away from the wall, and do not pack extra items into the room that is being treated. Stacking the spare room’s contents onto the bed makes it harder, not easier.

Several Bedrooms on One Day

When the inspection finds bedbugs in more than one bedroom, heat can usually take them in the same visit. The rooms are planned in an order that suits the layout of the house, and each one is held at temperature and checked before it counts as done. With three or four rooms that is a long day, and we will tell you roughly how long when we give the price, so you can plan where everyone goes.

Everyone in the household, and any pets, stays out of the treated rooms until they have cooled. In a big house it can be tempting to carry on in the kitchen while the bedrooms are done; talk to us about that on the phone first rather than deciding on the day, because it depends on which rooms are being heated and where the kit runs.

Deciding which bedrooms go on the list is a separate question from how to heat them, and the Orpington page on big family houses goes through it. Spare rooms that stand empty for months have their own page too: guest rooms in large houses.

How Size Changes the Price

Treatments start from £220. For heat the figure then follows the number of rooms, because each one is prepared, heated, held and checked in its own right. A single bedroom in a large house costs about what it would anywhere else; four bedrooms and a lounge cost a good deal more. Heat is always dearer than chemical for the same rooms.

You get the full price on the phone before anything is booked, based on the rooms you describe or, better, the rooms an inspection finds. Inspections are from £120, and in a larger house they tend to earn their keep by keeping clear rooms off the bill.

When Heat Is Worth It in a Big House

The extra cost of heat is easiest to justify when it saves something else. That tends to be one of these:

• Bedbugs have been found in several bedrooms, and a course of chemical visits across all of them would mean weeks of stripped beds and cleared floors.
• The household cannot manage repeat visits, perhaps because of work, school runs or an older relative who finds disruption hard.
• There is a lot of cluttered or heavy furniture that residual insecticide cannot reach into, such as divan bases, upholstered headboards and full wardrobes.
• Eggs are the worry: heat takes them in the one visit, so there is no fortnight of waiting for them to hatch into a treated room.

Where it is one bedroom with the rest of the house clear, heat still works, but chemical often does the job for less. That route is set out on our chemical treatment page for Bromley, which deals with treating a house room by room.

Getting a Big House Ready

The preparation list is the same as for any heat treatment, only longer. Aerosols, candles, medication, vinyl, some electronics and plants come out of every room being treated. In a house with several bedrooms that is worth doing the evening before, room by room, with a box for each so nothing is left behind or put in the wrong place.

Put those items somewhere that is not being treated and is not a bedroom; a kitchen worktop or a garage shelf is fine. Leave beds, mattresses and furniture where they are. The London preparation guide has the full list, and if you are arranging this for a parent, our guide to bedbugs in an older relative’s home covers doing it on their behalf.

For everything else about bedbugs in Bromley homes, see the borough page, or ring 0800 955 1018.

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