Do Electric Blankets Kill Bedbugs in Newham?

The idea is understandable. Heat treatment is one of the two ways professionals deal with bedbugs, and an electric blanket is a heater that sits right where the bugs are. The trouble is that the blanket and a heat treatment work on completely different scales.

Why a Warm Bed Is Not a Treatment

Bedbugs like warmth. It is one of the signals that leads them to a sleeping person. An electric blanket is designed to keep a bed comfortable for a human, which is well below anything that harms an insect. At its highest setting it is still a comfortable bed, just a warmer one.

Even if the surface of the mattress got hot, the bugs are not only on the surface. They sit in the seams, underneath in the base, in the joints of the frame, behind the headboard and in the skirting. When one spot gets uncomfortable they simply walk to a cooler one nearby. Eggs glued deep in a seam or a joint stay where they are and hatch later.

The Safety Risk of Trying

People who try this tend to do things the manufacturer warns against: leaving the blanket on all day with nobody in the room, folding it or piling bedding on top to trap the heat, running it under a mattress it was not made for, or adding a fan heater pointed at the bed. Those are the conditions in which electric blankets and heaters overheat and catch fire.

• Use an electric blanket only as the instructions say, and never as a pest treatment.
• Do not leave heaters running unattended near bedding or furniture.
• Do not wrap, fold or cover a heated blanket to make it hotter.
• Check an older blanket for scorch marks or worn cables and replace it if in doubt.

In a home where several people sleep in one room, or where a bed is in use day and night, a fire risk like this is not worth taking for a method that does not work.

What Controlled Heat Actually Does

A professional heat treatment heats the whole room, not a bed. Specialist heaters and fans raise the air, the furniture, the walls near the floor and the contents to a temperature bedbugs cannot survive, and hold it there long enough for the heat to soak into the thickest items. The bugs have nowhere cooler to walk to.

A technician stays with the equipment throughout and watches it on a thermal camera, looking for cold spots in corners, inside furniture and behind the bed until they come up too. That is what reaches the eggs, and it is why heat is usually a single visit. The London guide can bedbugs survive heat treatment explains where they could hide if a treatment were done badly.

Heat-sensitive items come out first: aerosols, candles, medication, vinyl, plants and some electronics. Everyone, pets included, is out of the room for most of a day. The heat treatment page for Newham covers how that works in a terraced family house.

Other Home Heat Methods People Try

Hair dryers, steamers and hot water bottles come up too. A domestic steamer used slowly along a seam can kill bugs it touches directly, but it misses anything out of reach and cannot touch the frame or the walls. A tumble dryer is useful for bedding and clothes, which is covered in do you need to throw clothes away. None of these treats a room.

What to Do Instead

1. Switch the blanket back to normal use, or off.
2. Keep sleeping in the same bed so the problem stays in one place.
3. Hot-wash the bedding and dry it on a hot cycle.
4. Photograph any spotting or bugs, and catch one in a jar if you can.
5. Ring 0800 955 1018 for a price on heat or chemical treatment.

If you are not sure the bites are from bedbugs at all, an inspection starts from £120 and treatments from £220.

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