Bedbug Heat Treatment Islington

What We Need to Know Before the Day

How the heat equipment works, and the list of things that leave the room before it starts, are set out on the London bedbug heat treatment page for the full explanation. For a flat in a converted house, the phone call beforehand is mostly about the building. We will ask:

• which floor the flat is on, and whether any of it is below street level or up in the roof;
• roughly how high the ceilings are, and whether the main rooms still have their original proportions;
• whether the flat is all on one level or has steps, a half-landing or a room reached through another;
• where the fuse board is and whether you know what the supply was last rewired for;
• whether you own the flat, rent it, or rent it through an agent who manages the whole house.

None of these answers stops a heat treatment. They decide how much equipment comes, where it stands and how long the day runs.

Tall Rooms, Big Windows and Old Floors

The first-floor rooms of a Georgian or early Victorian house were built to impress: high ceilings, long sash windows and sometimes a pair of rooms joined by wide doors. A room like that holds a lot of air, and warm air rises and escapes through gaps around the sashes. We bring enough heaters and fans for the volume, close the room up as well as it will close, and use the thermal camera to find the places that lag behind, which in these rooms are usually low corners, window reveals and the floor near an outside wall.

Old floorboards have gaps between them, and the void underneath is often shared with the flat below. Heat reaches the boards and the bugs sheltering in the cracks. It does not treat the space under them from end to end, which is one reason we look at the edges afterwards.

If your rooms still have shutters, panelling or other original joinery, the Barnsbury page deals with what treatment means for them. A flat with a sleeping platform built into a high room is covered on the Angel page.

Your Floor Level Changes the Day

The same house can hold three quite different flats.

• Lower ground floor. Cooler walls and floors, often a single window at the front and a door to the garden at the back. The rooms take a little longer to come up to temperature, and we watch the floor edges closely.
• Raised ground and first floor. The biggest rooms in the house. Plenty of space to work, but the most air to heat.
• Top floor. Smaller rooms, sloping ceilings, sometimes cupboards tucked into the eaves. The equipment has further to travel up the stairs, and low eaves cupboards need emptying so heat can get into them.

Tell us the floor when you ring. It changes how we plan the day, not whether heat is possible.

Power, Fuses and an Older Conversion

Heat equipment draws a good deal of electricity. Plenty of conversions were rewired when the house was split, but some flats still run on a modest supply shared across a small number of circuits. We ask about the fuse board in advance so we can spread the load sensibly. If the board is in a shared cupboard in the hall, we need to know who holds the key, because a tripped switch we cannot reach stops the treatment.

Please do not run the washing machine, dryer or oven while the heaters are on. The technician will tell you on the day which sockets are in use and which to leave alone.

The Rest of the House

Your flat is heated on its own. The hall, the staircase and the other flats are not part of the job unless whoever runs the building asks for them. Because the floors and walls are shared, a light residual insecticide may be put along skirtings and pipe gaps on those shared sides once the rooms have cooled; heat leaves nothing behind, and this is there for any bug that arrives later.

If you rent, put the problem to your landlord or managing agent in writing. Who arranges and pays depends on your tenancy and on how the bedbugs came in, and we are pest controllers, not legal advisers. A landlord with a flat standing empty between tenancies can book a check through bedbug inspections in Islington. If you have no spare room to move belongings into on the day, the Islington bedbug control page covers that problem.

Price, and the Other Route

Treatments start from £220, and heat costs more than chemical. The figure depends on how many rooms are heated, and we give it to you on 0800 955 1018 before anything is booked. If a single visit is not important to you and the budget is, chemical treatment in Islington is a course of shorter visits instead.

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