Bedbug Control Sutton

How Bedbugs Get From One Bedroom to the Next

Bedbugs do not wander a house for the sake of it. They sit in the seams, joints and cracks nearest a sleeping person and come out at night to feed. A house with four bedrooms can have a busy colony in one bed and nothing at all across the landing, sometimes for months.

What carries them further is almost always people. A child climbs into a parent’s bed after a bad dream and goes back with a bug in their pyjamas. A duvet is dragged into the spare room. A worried parent moves a mattress onto the landing to look at it. Each of those is a short trip for an insect that would otherwise have stayed put.

In a semi-detached house there is a second, slower route: pipework and the gaps along skirtings and floorboards. That is one reason we look at the rooms either side of the one with bites, not just the bed itself.

How to Tell It Is Still One Room

You cannot be sure by looking at bites alone, because bites vary and some people in the same house do not react at all. Evidence in the furniture tells you more. Check each bed in the house with a bright torch held low across the fabric.

• Spotting. Small dark dots along mattress piping, on the corners of the base and on bare wood where slats meet the rails.
• Shed skins and eggs. Pale, papery skins and pinhead-sized white eggs tucked into folds and joints.
• Live insects. Flat, reddish-brown and about the size of an apple pip when grown; the young are paler and much smaller.
• Who is waking up with marks. If bites are new in a second bedroom, treat that as a sign until an inspection says otherwise.

If you find nothing in the other beds, that is good news but not a clean bill of health. Our London guide to early signs of bedbugs shows what each sign looks like close up, and bedbugs or something else helps when the insect you caught does not quite match.

The First Fortnight

Here is the order we suggest from the day you find them. None of it involves throwing anything out.

1. Day one: keep the specimen in a sealed bag or jar, photograph any spotting, and put clean sheets back on the affected bed.
2. Day one or two: ring 0800 955 1018. Say how many bedrooms the house has, which bed shows signs and who has marks.
3. If you are unsure whether it is bedbugs, or whether it has spread, book an inspection from £120 before anything else.
4. Within the first week: agree heat or chemical and a date. You hear the price for your rooms before you commit.
5. Until the visit: everyone sleeps in their own bed, bedding from the affected room is bagged in that room and hot-washed, and nothing moves between bedrooms.
6. Keep a simple diary of new bites or sightings and which room they were in.

Two weeks is not a deadline, but it is roughly how long it takes a new batch of eggs to hatch. Getting a treatment date inside that window means fewer bugs to deal with and less chance of a second room.

Keeping Everyone in Their Own Bed

This is the hardest part for families. A child who has been bitten wants to sleep with a parent; a parent wants to move the child out of the room. Both feel protective and both tend to spread bedbugs, because the insects follow the sleeper and now have two beds instead of one.

If a young child cannot settle alone, it is better for the adult to go to the child’s bed than the other way round, and to change into fresh night clothes before going back to their own room. Sofas and airbeds are best avoided altogether. For the harder moment when a child moves into a room of their own, see our Wallington page.

Heat or Chemical in a Family House

Both routes work in a semi or a bungalow; the choice is about how many rooms are involved and what the household can manage. Chemical treatment puts a residual insecticide into seams, frames and skirtings. It suits a single bedroom caught early, costs less, and takes an hour or two a visit, but because it does not reliably kill eggs there are usually two visits and sometimes three, about 10 to 14 days apart. Details are on our chemical treatment page for the borough.

Heat raises each treated room to a temperature bedbugs cannot survive and holds it, with a thermal camera used to find cold spots. It kills eggs as well, usually in one visit lasting most of a day, which suits a family that would rather not live through a course of visits. It costs more, and pets and heat-sensitive items come out first. See heat treatment here for doing several bedrooms in one day.

Treatments start from £220, and the figure depends on the number of rooms and the method. For a side-by-side view, read heat treatment vs chemical treatment.

If a Second Room Shows Signs

Tell us straight away rather than waiting for the booked date. It usually changes the plan, not the approach: the second room is added, and with several rooms heat often becomes the more practical choice. An inspection can check the rooms that seem clear so you are not paying to treat bedrooms that do not need it.

Questions Families Ask Next

Once the first shock passes, the questions change. Parents often ask whether bedbugs spread disease, and how long marks on a child will stay is covered in how long bedbug bites last. If the insect came from a nest in the eaves, bird mites and bat bugs explains why that is a different problem. Boxes that come out of the loft once a year are the subject of bedbugs in stored decorations, and telling work, school or friends deals with who needs to know.

Pages for Particular Households

Each area page takes one situation. Belmont covers a chalet bungalow with bedrooms in the roof, Cheam a guest who tells you afterwards they had bedbugs, and Beddington a heavy bed that will not come apart. Worcester Park is for anyone bringing a youth group home from a trip.

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