Bedbug Control Hanwell

Work Out Which Rooms the Children Actually Use

Minded children rarely go into your bedroom, but they nap somewhere, sit on a sofa for stories, and leave coats and bags in a hall. List those places. If the signs are only in your own bedroom and the children never go in, the job and the timing look very different from a house where the cot or nap mats are in the affected room.

Check the nap mats, travel cots and cushions carefully along the seams and zips. Dark spotting, pale shed skins and small reddish-brown insects are the things to look for. If you are unsure, a bedbug inspection from £120 settles it before you tell anyone anything.

Timing the Treatment Around Your Minding Days

For a Hanwell childminder, book the visit for a day you are not minding. Heat treatment takes most of a day, and the rooms can be used again once they have cooled, so a Friday treatment usually leaves the house ready for Monday. It kills eggs and usually needs one visit, which suits a working week that cannot be interrupted twice.

Chemical treatment takes one to two hours a visit and the rooms are back in use once the treated surfaces are dry, but it usually needs a second visit about ten to fourteen days later, and sometimes a third. Ask us to book both dates at once so you can plan closures around them. On either route, follow the instructions we give you on the day about when rooms can be used and by whom.

Telling the Parents

Parents would much rather hear it from you than find a bite and wonder. Keep the message short and factual, and put it in writing:

• What was found, and where in the house
• Whether the rooms their child uses are affected
• The date of treatment and any days you will be closed
• What you are doing with shared items such as nap bedding and soft toys
• A suggestion that they check their child's bag and coat at home

If you are registered, check what your registration body expects you to report. We are pest controllers, not advisers on that side of things, but we can give you a written note of what we treated and when.

Toys, Bedding and the Setting Itself

Washable toys and nap bedding go through a hot wash and a full dry. For favourites that cannot be washed, the Ealing guide on children's soft toys has the detail, and plastic storage boxes covers storing toys safely out of the way. Plenty of Hanwell childminders keep a separate box of play things for the minded children; that box should be checked too.

Coats and bags that arrive with the children each morning are worth keeping on hooks in the hall, away from the rooms that have been treated, for a few weeks afterwards.

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