How Should You Prepare Your Home for Bedbug Heat Treatment?

A heat treatment does not need your home emptied, and anyone telling you to bag up the contents of a flat is making work. What it needs is a short list of things out, a shorter list of things moved, and enough access for heat to get where it is going.

The Week Before

• Buy a few large, sealable bags. Not bin liners — something that closes properly
• If you have a lot of clothing in the room, start working through it now rather than on the morning
• Book somewhere to be for the day, and somewhere for pets to go
• Tell the people either side if you are in a flat or a terrace, particularly if you share a party wall
• Do not start spraying anything. Shop aerosols scatter bedbugs into wall voids and make the treatment harder

What Has to Come Out of the Room

This is the list we send you in writing, and it is short:

• Aerosols of any kind, and anything else pressurised
• Candles, wax melts and cosmetics that will slump or separate
• Medication, including anything in a bedside drawer, and anything refrigerated
• Vinyl records, cassettes and photographic film
• Musical instruments, especially anything glued or strung
• Some electronics — we go through these with you rather than guess
• Houseplants
• Alcohol and anything else that will expand or spoil
• Pets, and their bedding, without exception

Anything you take out of the room needs to go somewhere that has not got bedbugs in it. Do not stack it in the hall and bring it back in afterwards without a thought — that is how a treated room gets reseeded on the same evening.

What Should Stay Exactly Where It Is

More important than the removal list, and more often got wrong.

• The bed. Do not strip it, do not move it, do not throw it out
• The mattress. Heat goes through it where it lies
• Bedside furniture and wardrobes. We will pull them out; you moving them across the property spreads the problem
• Anything you have already found bedbugs in. It needs to be in the room being treated, not in the room that is not

The Night Before

1. Finish the removal list, so the morning is not spent on it.
2. Pull furniture six inches off the walls if you can do it without dragging it through the property. If you cannot, leave it and say so.
3. Clear the floor. Not deep-cleaned — just clear enough to walk and to place equipment.
4. Put anything you will need during the day somewhere else. You will not be nipping back in.
5. Sleep in the bed as normal. This is not a misprint: moving out the night before pushes bedbugs to look for you elsewhere.

The Morning

Let us in, walk the room with the technician and say what you have and have not managed. Nobody minds an honest 'I could not shift the wardrobe'. What causes problems is finding out at two o'clock that there is an aerosol at the back of a drawer.

Then go out. Take the pets. Take your phone charger.

Coming Back

The room will be warm and will smell faintly of warm dust, which goes in an hour with a window open. There is nothing to wipe down and nothing to avoid touching.

Bring your things back in, but think about the bags first. Anything that was in the room and came out unbagged went out with whatever was on it.

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