What Actually Happens on the Day
A heat treatment is a day's work in one room or a set of rooms, and it runs in the same order every time.
- We arrive and walk the room with you. Anything heat will spoil comes out now — you will already have the list, because we send it when the job is booked.
- Heaters and fans go in. The fans matter more than people expect. Still hot air stratifies and leaves the floor and the back of the wardrobe twenty degrees behind the ceiling.
- The room comes up slowly. Probes go into the places bedbugs actually sit — inside the mattress, in the frame joint, under the carpet edge — not into the middle of the room where the air is hottest.
- It is held there. Reaching a temperature is not the job. Holding it long enough for the heat to soak into timber, fabric and plaster is the job.
- The thermal camera comes out. Cold spots show up as dark patches on the screen: behind a headboard bolted to a wall, under a heavy divan, inside a built-in wardrobe. Those are the places treatment fails if nobody looks.
- It cools and you get the room back. Same day, once it is down to a temperature you would want to sleep in.
Why Heat Gets the Eggs
A bedbug egg is glued into a crack and coated to survive drying out. That coating is very good at keeping a liquid insecticide out, which is exactly why a chemical treatment needs a second visit — the eggs that were there on day one hatch later and have to walk onto the residue to die.
Temperature does not have that problem. Heat is not something the egg can be sealed against; it passes through the shell as readily as it passes through the mattress the egg is glued to. Adults, nymphs and eggs all reach a lethal temperature in the same pass, which is the whole reason one visit is usually enough.
What Comes Out of the Room First
Most of what you own is fine. This is the short list of what is not, and we send it in writing when the job goes in the diary:
- Aerosols of any kind, and anything pressurised
- Candles, wax melts and cosmetics that will slump
- Medication, including anything in a bedside drawer
- Vinyl records, cassettes and photographic film
- Musical instruments, particularly anything glued or stringed
- Some electronics — we go through these with you rather than guess
- Houseplants, and pets and their bedding without exception
What Heat Does Not Do
Worth saying plainly, because it is the one thing a heat treatment cannot claim. Heat has no memory. The moment the room is cool it is an ordinary room again, with nothing in it that would kill a bedbug walking in from somewhere else.
In a detached house with one affected bedroom that does not matter. In a converted flat sharing a party wall, a block where the neighbours have the same problem, or an HMO where people move between rooms, it matters a great deal — and in those cases we put a light residual product along the edges after the heat, so there is something waiting for anything that comes back.
Anyone selling you heat as a permanent barrier is selling you something it is not.
Bedbug Heat Treatment London — Questions
Do I need to leave the property?
You need to be out of the room being treated, and out of the ones either side of it while it is at temperature. Most people go out for the day. Pets go with you.
How hot does the room actually get?
Hot enough that you would not want to stand in it, and held there for hours rather than minutes. The number that matters is not the air temperature but the temperature inside the mattress and the frame joint, which is what the probes and the camera are for.
Will it set off the smoke alarms?
Heat treatment produces no smoke. Some heat-sensitive alarms will trigger on temperature alone, so we isolate the ones in the treated room and put them back afterwards. In a hotel or a managed block we arrange that with your fire officer first.
Can you heat-treat a whole flat rather than one room?
Yes, and in a flat where they have already moved between rooms that is usually the sensible call. It takes longer and costs more than a single room, and we would rather quote you for what finishes it.
Is heat treatment safe with children in the house?
There is nothing left in the room afterwards to be exposed to, which is the reason a lot of families choose it. Everyone is out while the room is at temperature, children included.
Heat Treatment — Questions Answered in Full
Written up in full — how each one works, what it costs you and how it goes wrong.
How Heat Treatment Works, and Does It Kill Eggs?
What heat actually does to a bedbug, and why an egg has no defence against it.
Read more →
How Long Does a Heat Treatment Take?
Why one London flat takes four hours and another takes ten, and what decides it.
Read more →
Heat or Chemical: How to Choose
Five questions to ask yourself. Answer them honestly and the right treatment picks itself.
Read more →
Preparing Your Home for Heat Treatment
What to do the week before, the night before and the morning of. A plan, not a list.
Read more →
Can Bedbugs Survive a Heat Treatment?
Sometimes, yes. Here are the five ways it happens, and how each one is avoided.
Read more →Bedbug Control Across London
Every service runs on the same two treatment routes and covers all 33 boroughs. Start at the bedbug control London page if you are not sure which one you need.
Tell Us About the Property
Tell us how many rooms are involved and what is in them, and we will tell you what a heat treatment would cost.