Bedbug Control Elm Park

What Changes at the Weekend

Bedbugs feed where a sleeping person is. If you are only bitten on certain nights, look at what is different on those nights. The usual answers are simple:

• You sleep in a different bed, perhaps a partner's, a spare room or a sofa bed
• You nap in the afternoon on the sofa or in an armchair
• Someone stays over and uses a bag, a sleeping bag or a guest bed
• A child comes to stay and sleeps in a room that is empty during the week
• You lie in longer, so you are in bed later into the morning

Each of those points to a particular piece of furniture, and it is rarely the bed you use from Monday to Friday. Check that one first. It also helps to ask anyone else in the house whether their nights change at the weekend, because the person being bitten is not always the one who moved.

Keeping a Bite Diary

Two or three weeks of notes will usually show the pattern better than memory can. Each morning, write down:

1. Where you slept, and where you sat or dozed the evening before.
2. Where the bites are. Arms, neck, legs, and whether they are in a line or a cluster.
3. Who was in the house. Visitors, children, anyone using a spare bed.
4. What you checked. Note the furniture you looked at and what, if anything, you found.

If the bites only follow one bed or one chair, look closely at it with a torch: seams, joints, the underside and any cushion zips. Our guide to early signs shows what the spotting and shed skins look like.

When It Is Not Bedbugs

A weekly pattern can also point elsewhere: a garden, a pet that sleeps on the bed at weekends, a swimming session, or something washed differently. If you have checked the furniture carefully and found nothing, see bedbugs or something else, and speak to a pharmacist or GP about the bites themselves.

If you cannot settle it, an inspection from £120 looks at the furniture your diary points to and gives you an answer before anything is spent on treatment.

If the Pattern Leads to One Bed

That is good news of a kind, because it usually means a small, contained problem. Keep using that bed on the same nights rather than avoiding it, so the bedbugs stay where they are. A single room in an Elm Park house is often a job for chemical treatment. Treatments start from £220, with the figure given on the phone. For how a family's routines bring bedbugs in and how to change them, see the Havering page.

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