Food, Medicines and Kitchen Items During Treatment: Havering

Why the Kitchen Is Usually Not the Problem

Bedbugs live where people sleep or sit still for long spells: beds, sofas, armchairs. They are not interested in food, so a kitchen with a bedbug problem is unusual. In most houses the kitchen is not a treated room at all.

The exceptions are open-plan rooms where a sofa sits next to the kitchen area, and bedsit-style rooms where someone sleeps, cooks and stores food in the same space. If either describes your home, say so when you ring, because it changes what needs to move.

Food in the Rooms Being Treated

Look for food where it does not usually live: snacks in a bedside drawer, a box of sweets on a shelf, drinks by the bed, pet food in a bedroom corner. All of it comes out, whichever treatment you have.

• For heat, anything that would melt, spoil or expand comes out: chocolate, fizzy drinks, alcohol, anything in a sealed bottle or can. Take it to the kitchen.
• For chemical, open food, drinks and pet bowls come out of treated rooms so nothing sits where the residual is applied.
• In a sitting room being treated, clear the coffee table and empty the sideboard of anything you eat or drink.

Medicines

The bedside drawer is where medication usually lives, and the bedside table is one of the pieces of furniture we treat most closely. That makes medicine the item most worth sorting before the day.

For heat, all medication leaves the room, without exception. That includes tablets, creams, eye drops and anything pressurised, such as an inhaler, which counts as an aerosol for this purpose. Anything that normally lives in the fridge stays in the fridge, provided the fridge is not in a room being heated.

For chemical, take medicine out of bedside drawers and cabinets in treated rooms and keep it somewhere else until the course of visits is done. Put it in a clean bag first rather than loose in a kitchen drawer, in case anything came out with it.

Whatever the treatment, keep anything that someone needs during the day with you. If you are unsure how a particular medicine should be stored for a few hours, a pharmacist can tell you.

Kitchen Items That End Up Elsewhere

Mugs, plates and baby bottles migrate to bedrooms and sofas in every house. Collect them before the day. For chemical treatment, anything left in a treated room should be washed before it is used again; it is simpler not to leave any there.

Appliances in a bedroom, such as a small fridge, kettle or microwave, need a mention when you ring. For heat they may need to come out or be switched off, and we would rather talk it through than have you guess.

Heat and Chemical Side by Side

• Heat: food, drink and all medication out of the heated rooms; room back in use once cooled, with nothing left on surfaces.
• Chemical: open food, drink, pet bowls and medication out of treated rooms; room usable once dry; a second visit, sometimes a third, 10 to 14 days apart.
• Both: kitchen normally untouched unless it is part of the living or sleeping space.

For the wider picture, the Havering heat treatment page and the chemical treatment page set out how each one runs in a family home, and our London guide on where pest controllers treat shows which surfaces get the residual.

The Day Itself

1. The night before, walk each room being treated and take out food, drink and medication.
2. Pack anything you or the children will need during the day, medicines included, in a bag you keep with you.
3. Tell the technician about anything you could not move.
4. Once the room is back in use, return medicine and food to their usual places and follow the instructions given on the day.

← Bedbug Control Havering · Bedbug Control London