How to Bag and Store Belongings During Treatment: Kingston

Whether you are having heat or chemical treatment, some of what is in the room will need to be bagged: clothes, bedding, soft toys, books, the contents of drawers. The point is to stop bedbugs travelling with those things while the room is being dealt with, and to make sure nothing untreated goes back in.

Which Bags to Use

• Strong, clear plastic sacks for clothes and bedding, so you can see what is inside without opening them.
• Resealable zip bags for small things: chargers, jewellery, make-up, toys.
• Plastic crates with tight lids for books, papers and shoes.
• Tape or cable ties to close the sacks, twisted and folded over first.
• Thin bin liners only as an inner layer; they split, and a split bag is an open one.

Avoid cardboard boxes if you can. The corrugations and folded flaps are just the kind of tight space bedbugs use, and cardboard cannot be washed.

Labelling

Write on every bag, in marker, two things: which room it came from and whether its contents have been washed and dried hot. “Main bedroom, clean” and “Main bedroom, not yet washed” are very different bags, and they look identical at the bottom of a pile a week later. If several people are involved, such as a family house or a shared student house, add the person’s name.

What Goes Where

1. Washable fabrics: bag them in the room, carry the sealed bag to the machine, hot-wash and hot-dry, then put them in a new bag marked clean.
2. Things that cannot be washed but can go in a hot dryer: dry them, then bag them as clean.
3. Things that can take neither: bag them sealed, marked not yet treated, and tell us about them.
4. Heat-sensitive items for heat treatment, such as aerosols, candles, medication and some electronics: check them over, bag or box them, and keep them out of the rooms being treated.
5. Clean bags go somewhere away from the bedrooms, like a hallway, kitchen or car boot, never back on the bed.

Keep the clean bags and the untreated ones apart. The easiest mistake is to wash everything carefully and then stack it against a bag that was never opened.

Heat or Chemical Changes the List

With heat treatment, much of what is in the room can stay there and be treated with it, because the whole room comes up to a temperature bedbugs cannot survive. What must come out is the heat-sensitive list we send you, and the London guide to preparing for heat has the detail.

With chemical treatment, the floor has to be clear and the bedding stripped, so more gets bagged and it stays bagged for longer, because the course runs to two or three visits. The page on chemical treatment in the borough sets out what each visit involves.

How Long to Keep Things Sealed

Washed and dried belongings are clean, but put them back into an untreated room and they can pick the bugs straight back up. So keep even the clean bags sealed until the room is finished: after the heat visit once the room has cooled, or after the final chemical visit. Bags of untreated items stay sealed until they have been washed, dried or checked; do not open them in a bedroom to have a look. If a student is packing for halls in the middle of all this, pack only from the clean bags.

Unpacking Afterwards

Open one bag at a time, on a hard floor, in good light. Put things away as they come out, and throw the empty bag away rather than keeping it. If you spot anything that looks like a bug or dark spotting, stop, close the bag again and ring us. Do not move furniture back and forth to make room; our guide on moving furniture between rooms explains why.

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