Bedbug Control Poplar

The Risk Is the Journey, Not the Machine

A hot wash followed by a full hot tumble dry kills bedbugs and eggs in fabric. The machine itself is not the problem. The risk is everything either side of it: an open basket carried along a corridor, a pile of sheets sorted on the shared folding table, clothes left overnight on a drying rack next to someone else's.

Bedbugs do not live in a laundry room the way they live in a bedroom, because nobody sleeps there. But a room where a dozen households put down bags and baskets is a place where one can drop off one load and climb into another.

Doing Your Washing Without Spreading Them

1. Bag it in the room it came from. Strip the bed straight into a strong bag and tie it before it goes through the flat.
2. Carry it closed through the corridor and lift, and keep it off the floor and off the shared benches when you get there.
3. Tip it straight from the bag into the drum. No sorting on the table. Sort at home before bagging if you need to.
4. Put the empty bag in the outside bin, tied, rather than bringing it back up.
5. Use the hottest wash the fabric allows and a full hot dry. A drying room or rack is not a substitute for the tumble dryer for these loads.
6. Bring the clean load back in a new bag and keep it bagged until the bed is treated.

If the machines are busy, wait with the bag rather than leaving it on the floor for later. And if you can, do these loads at a quiet time, when there is less of other people's washing sitting around.

If You Think the Laundry Room Itself Has Them

Signs in a shared room look the same as anywhere: dark spotting along the seams of a bench cushion, in the joints of a wooden drying rack or along the skirting. If you see them, report it to whoever manages the block, in writing, with the date and what you saw. Communal areas are for the building's management to deal with, not individual residents.

Our guide on bedbugs in lifts and corridors explains how they move around a shared building and which communal spaces are worth worrying about. The short version: the places people sit or rest for a while matter more than the places they pass through.

Treating the Flat

Because washing is harder without your own machine, the preparation for treatment takes more planning in a Poplar block. Chemical treatment asks for bedding and the clothes from the affected room to be washed before each visit, and there are usually two or three visits. Heat treatment treats fabrics in the room, so there is less to carry downstairs, though heat-sensitive items still come out first. It costs more than chemical. Tell us when you ring that the machines are shared, and we will tell you what really needs washing and what can stay for the heat. For other shared-building questions across Tower Hamlets, see the borough page.

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