Got Bed Bugs? Bedbugger Forums Topic: Car treatment

Got Bed Bugs? Bedbugger Forums Topic: Car treatment http://bedbugger.com/forum/ Bed bug support forums en Sun, 26 May 2013 05:03:32 +0000 Nobugsonme on "Car treatment" http://bedbugger.com/forum/topic/car-treatment-1#post-116947 Fri, 12 Aug 2011 15:43:35 +0000 Nobugsonme 116947@http://bedbugger.com/forum/ Yes, in that case, park in the sun and if you do have a straggler there, it just may do the trick. Ihatebedbugs1 on "Car treatment" http://bedbugger.com/forum/topic/car-treatment-1#post-116902 Fri, 12 Aug 2011 09:27:35 +0000 Ihatebedbugs1 116902@http://bedbugger.com/forum/ Thank u both for ur answers. I don't want to treat anything in my car... I get that it wouldn't work. And I'm not even sure that my car is infested, I just thought that maybe if 1 of those demons hitched a ride to my car and stayed would it bake in my car. I didn't think about cool spots still exsisting. So thanks again for the input! Nobugsonme on "Car treatment" http://bedbugger.com/forum/topic/car-treatment-1#post-116875 Fri, 12 Aug 2011 02:05:01 +0000 Nobugsonme 116875@http://bedbugger.com/forum/ ihatebedbugs1, It sounds like maybe you weren't thinking of putting stuff in your car to treat the stuff (which, as buggyinsocal points out, really is not reliable or as easy as people think). It sounds to me like you might be considering just trying to debug just the car itself. While the principles buggyinsocal mentions do apply here also, if you're in a hot location, and the car is parked in a sunny spot and left there, all day if not for days of very hot sunny weather, this might eliminate bed bugs in the car. I'm not an expert but I understand that every part of the car would need to get up to killing temperatures (see buggy's references for more on that) and stay at those temperatures long enough to kill the bed bugs. That means not just on top of the seats but inside the trunk, and deep inside the seats (which would provide insulation), and anywhere thin little bed bugs could go. That can be quite tricky. There might be cool pockets and they could move into those until the heat dies down. If I did read your question correctly, do you know that your car has bed bugs in it? In most cases, it seems like people don't infest their cars. If you know for a fact that it's infested, you might want to try other methods (like getting it treated with professional Vikane fumigation), but in terms of just the car being treated, the heat might help, if you're not relying on it. buggyinsocal on "Car treatment" http://bedbugger.com/forum/topic/car-treatment-1#post-116870 Fri, 12 Aug 2011 00:48:46 +0000 buggyinsocal 116870@http://bedbugger.com/forum/ <a href="http://bedbugger.com/forum/topic/dry-cleaners-vs-a-hot-car-in-the-summer-sun#post-52344">This</a> method <a href="http://bedbugger.com/forum/topic/leave-the-car-in-the-sun#post-74692">has</a> been <a href="http://bedbugger.com/forum/topic/carsun100d-temp-thermal-treatment-for-blankets-pillows-same-for-whole-apt#post-113160">repeatedly</a> debunked <a href="http://bedbugger.com/forum/topic/moving-car-heat">in many other threads.</a> You may notice that I wrote a lot of those responses. That's why I'm not rewriting those answers, again, here. Since it looks like you're new to the boards, I'll just point out that I live in sunny southern California. In the summer, it doesn't just get into the 90s here; in many desert areas it gets into the 120s. If I were reinfested, I would absolutely not use items in the sun in my car in the summer heat as a reliable treatment method, and, again, I can drive for a few hours and be in a place where the relative humidity is below 30%, the temps are over 120 F, and the run is positively relentless. It seems like a good idea to many people, but it's important to understand that a car infested with bed bugs is very difficult to treat, and it's much too easy if you're using your car this way to end up with an infestation there. Basically, the only 100% reliable way to treat a car is to use Vikane, and not a lot of places are set up to do that, and that's going to be really expensive. In addition, it's really hard to use the sun to treat bed bugs successfully; there are these pesky clouds that come out from time to time, and shade makes the temp inside the car go down. There are many ways that heat is used to battle bed bugs, but the use of heat to treat whole structures (like apartments, or houses, or cars) is actually a lot harder than it might seem. There's art and science involved, and with a car and the sun, you cannot control the rate of temperature increase which is vital to any successful thermal treatment of anything. A lot of those threads mention some of the science; I'm a humanities major, so I'm really not going to try to explain heat transfer and such because I'll mangle it, but it's a lot harder to do successfully than people expect. If you go back far enough (read: more than 3 years), you'll see me asking the exact same kinds of questions. In those days, we didn't have Packtites, so I am sympathetic to why so many people want this to be a solution. However, I'd be remiss if I didn't warn people away from the treatment. Not only do you risk infesting your car, which is a pretty darned big risk, but you also risk not actually killing off the bugs and eggs in the items, and with bed bugs, one inseminated adult female and/or two eggs that hatch bed bugs of the opposite sex, or any other pair of bugs with one male and one female means failure, so I try only to recommend treatments that I have a high confidence will work effectively enough to eliminate all bugs and eggs reliably. A Packtite is a much safer and more reliable way to use heat to treat bed bugs. Of course, neither Packtite nor self-treatment of any kind is a substitute for treatment from an experienced professional, but the Packtite is a much more reliable tool in the fight against bed bugs than a car in the sun. Even here in the sunny, dry, superhot desert Southwest. Ihatebedbugs1 on "Car treatment" http://bedbugger.com/forum/topic/car-treatment-1#post-116862 Thu, 11 Aug 2011 23:26:37 +0000 Ihatebedbugs1 116862@http://bedbugger.com/forum/ would a car get hot enuff to treat itself, if it was 90 plus outside, and all the windows was rolled up?