Bedbug Heat Treatment Lewisham

Your Flat Is the Job, the House Is the Context

When we heat a flat in a conversion, the space we treat stops at your front door. We do not heat the communal stairs, the hallway or anyone else’s rooms. Everything inside your flat that could hold bedbugs is brought up to a temperature they cannot survive and kept there, bedroom first and then any other room on the quote.

What the house changes is everything around that. The kit has to come up a shared staircase, the neighbours may notice fans running for most of a day, and the floors and walls you share with them are the places bedbugs would use to get back in. The rest of this page is about those three things. If you want the treatment itself explained from the start, the London heat treatment page has the full explanation.

Getting the Kit Up a Shared Staircase

Converted houses tend to have one front door for several flats, a narrow hall and a stair that turns. Our heaters and fans are carried in, not wheeled across your carpets, and we keep the communal parts clear while we work. It helps if you tell us on the phone which floor you are on, whether there is a separate entrance, and whether bikes or prams usually stand in the hall.

Tell us too about any alarm that covers the whole house rather than just your flat. A smoke or heat detector inside your own rooms is something we deal with on the day, but a system linked to the other flats needs whoever manages the building to know in advance.

Floorboards, Skirtings and the Void Underneath

In an old house the floor of your flat is usually timber boards laid on joists, with a gap between the boards and the ceiling of the flat below. Bedbugs settle into the joins between boards, the gap at the foot of the skirting, and the holes where pipes drop through. Those edges are the slowest parts of a room to warm up, which is why the thermal camera spends most of its time pointed at them.

Where a reading shows an edge lagging behind, we redirect the air and wait, and we do not start the cool-down until the whole room has held the heat. Rugs are lifted, beds are pulled away from the wall, and anything pushed tight into a corner is moved so warm air can reach behind it. Our guide on bedbugs behind wallpaper, sockets and picture frames covers the other hiding places heat has to get into.

The Edges You Share, After the Heat

Heat kills what is in your flat on the day, eggs included, and then it is gone. In a detached house that is rarely a concern. In a conversion, the skirting on a party wall and the gaps at floor level border somebody else’s home, and the heat does nothing to stop a bedbug arriving from there next week.

So once the rooms have cooled, we usually put a light residual product along those shared edges: the skirting against the neighbour’s wall, the floor edges and the points where pipes pass through. It is a small, targeted application, not a second treatment, and we tell you where it has gone and what to do around it.

The Flat Next Door

Whether the neighbours need to do anything depends on whether they have bedbugs too, and you may not know. If the signs in your flat are heaviest along a shared wall or at the floor edges rather than in the bed, that is worth raising with them. The Brockley page goes through how to read those signs and how to have that conversation.

On the day itself, a friendly word that you are having work done and that there may be some fan noise for most of the day saves questions. If you rent, let the landlord or agent know the date as well; the Lewisham page explains why the whole building is worth keeping in mind.

What Heat Costs Here, and When Chemical Makes More Sense

Treatments start from £220. A heat job costs more than a chemical one, and the figure depends on how many rooms are being heated, so a one-bedroom flat with a small living room is priced differently from a flat taking up a whole floor. We give you the exact price on the phone before anything is booked.

Heat suits a conversion when you want it finished in one visit and cannot face a course of appointments. If you are renting and the visits would be easy to arrange, or the budget matters more than the speed, chemical treatment in Lewisham may be the better fit.

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