Getting out of the house without bugs/eggs and a couple more thermal questions..

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Getting out of the house without bugs/eggs and a couple more thermal questions..

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tryingtobecalm

newbite
Joined: May '09
Posts: 11

Posted 6 months ago
Tue May 19 2009 2:27:36
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This board is saving my life- seriously. 3 questions:

1) How can you make sure there are no bugs on your person when you leave the house just before treatment? My best guess is that people are prepping your homes, showering, putting on clothes that are straight out of the dryer and then busting out of there? Yes? No? We'll be taking our dog and my purse... not sure what else? What about our work bags? Should I just leave those? Ugh- the thought of all this time and money being invested, just for me to carry eggs back in on my clothes makes me ill. Any advice would be helpful...

2) We're going with thermal because there's a pretty high success rate with this in my area. However, I think I would feel much more comfortable if this was supplemented with a little chemical. Buggyinsocal shared her experience, which was super-helpful (thanks, buggy!). Has anyone else done this? If so, did you find a PCO who does both, did you have a different PCO come, or did you apply something yourself after the thermal? I'm just a little confused by this because all of the places I talked to today did either thermal OR chemical (thought I found one who did both, but I was wrong).

3) This is just something I'm sort of pondering- it doesn't seem like many people on these boards choose thermal. Why is this? Am I missing something? I mean, I've read various reviews- some claim it's amazing, some claim it doesn't work like it's supposed to. Seems to me that it depends more on the provider... but yeah, I guess I'm just curious.

Thanks, everyone! I can't tell you how helpful this board has been. We can beat these evil little guys!
buggyinsocal

oldtimer
Joined: Jun '08
Posts: 1,130

Posted 6 months ago
Tue May 19 2009 11:30:16
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1. My thermal PCO had me remove only my CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes, and anything like candles and/or wax-based make up (lipstick, eyeliner). Their advice was to leave everything you can in the residence, since anything you remove might have stragglers in it. (Actually, my PCO was pretty confident that the infestation was just in the bedroom, but, you know, for that kind of money, we weren't taking any chances.

I did shower right before I left, and I changed into shoes that hadn't been in the house just outside. I put on clothes that had been dried and then placed into ziplocks once I was done showering.

To be extra cautious, my cat went into her carrier and then straight to the groomer for a bath. I doubted she was carrying any with her, but I wasn't taking any chances.

(To complicate matters, I was leaving for a trip to a family wedding. The dress I was wearing for the wedding got dry cleaned. I only took with me clothes I knew were safe. I bought a bunch of new clothes when I got to the city where the wedding was. Luckily, I had a friend who lived south of the city in a town with an outlet mall with outlets of two of my favorite stores, so that was less expensive than it might have been. The suitcase and my standard work bag were inspected by one of the PCOs who showed me what to look for, which was actually one of the bed educational parts of the whole thing. There's really no substitute for seeing bed bug nymphs and eggs and adults live under the tutelage of a PCO who can say "Nope, that's just random debris. No, the egg would be about 1/4 that size and more off white than tan.")

There's an FAQ on the main website specifically about not spreading the bugs. Basically, you follow those protocols.

2. I think PCOs who do both chemical and thermal may be more common out here. Remember, California doesn't have, say, the very widespread problem with BB that NYC has. However, we have a very long history of an epic termite problem (at the moment, I know two people with termites on their property or in the property they are in escrow on.) Because termites can be treated with thermal or Vikane, and termites are such a problem, I expect our PCOs are more likely to do both. In parts of the country without a termite problem, that's less likely.

Honestly, knowing what I know now, I wouldn't have wanted the chemical treatment.

Done properly, thermal should get rid of the bugs in a single treatment, and I would prefer to minimize the exposure of me and the bugs to chemicals in the same way that I won't take an antibiotic unless I'm pretty sure it's not just a virus. If I take antibiotics when I don't need them, I contribute to the possibility that bacteria become more antibiotic resistant. If thermal can be successful without chemical pesticides, I'd prefer to hold the pesticides in reserve and not needlessly expose bugs to them, risking an increase in pesticide resistance.

In addition, we know that many of the chemical pesticides degrade at high temps, so applying them before thermal doesn't make much sense.

3. Thermal comes with many of the same drawbacks as Vikane and a few others. Like Vikane, it's more expensive up front, and for people who can't afford it and/or for people who are dependent upon landlords who aren't willing to pay for it don't really have it as an option.

In addition, done improperly, thermal does have the potential to damage your belongings. Several people who don't post regularly here any more who had it done before I joined the boards mentioned extensive damage. That surprised me as my damage was all minimal with a few exceptions. (The exceptions, as I mentioned, were my TiVo units, one of which was on its last legs and was dead when I came back. The other TiVo unit was new and died a few months later. The over ten year old microwave was also immediately dead. I didn't care about the microwave, but I wish the company had specifically instructed me to unplug the TiVos. In retrospect, that makes sense. They told me to be sure that any computers were unplugged. I'm sure it's because hard drives should not spin and run at 140 degrees F. But DVRs are increasingly common, and a thermal provider should recognize them and advise clients to unplug them, since unlike computers, DVRs do not have any off switch to be shut off but very much have hard drives. I know they understand about hard drives because they found my old back up iPod and brought it out to me while I was packing things up in the driveway.)

The only furniture that sustained damage was cheap IKEA stuff, and I'm okay with that. My furniture that belonged to my grandparents, which was in the bedroom where I presume temps were highest, came through it fine despite being over 50 years old at this point.

Also, thermal is not available everywhere. If you look at the Thermapure website to see where their licensees are, you'll notice that they aren't very widespread. (Please note: Thermapure isn't the only provider in the game, but their website gives you an idea of their geographical distribution.)

As someone who prefers, paranoid or not, to keep my (and my cats) exposure to chemical pesticides as low as possible, I think that thermal is a great option that should be more widely available. That's my personal preference, not a comment on what I think other people should do. I live on the left coast and travel in social circles in which many people try to eat local and organic whenever possible. I have friends who move in social circles in which many people choose not to vaccinate their children (which is not a position I could ever take). In the circles I move in, plenty of people are going to want to try to treat bed bugs in some sort of natural, organic, non-chemical way. Whether people are totally off our rockers about that desire or not, I know that there's always going to be a subset of the population who wants an approach along those lines, and who might try to self-treat using only "natural" methods without chemical pesticides.

I would prefer that there be at least one, if not more, effective approaches that such folks would be willing to use, since once one person gets infested, you have the possibility of them causing further infestations, which is why I'm a big fan of thermal. If you have people who won't vaccinate their children against measles, you're going to have people who won't use chemicals to get rid of bed bugs, and getting rid of bed bugs without chemicals is very, very hard if you aren't using thermal. (Or Vikane, or a very labor intensive combination of mechanical removal, steam heat, and DE--assuming that it continues to work.)

Thermal can be used to treat a single unit within an apartment building. I live in a building with fewer than ten units. The three apartments that were adjacent to mine were all rigorously inspected. I suspect, however, esp. in larger multi-unit buildings, even leaving cost aside, some LL are loathe to use thermal because if you only treat one or two units but other units have infestations that people don't know about, you could spend a lot of money chasing the bugs around. (Note: I'm not saying thermal would drive them from one apartment to the next. I'm saying that if Unit X is infested, and an inspection misses something in a unit five doors down, well, you get the idea.) It's cheaper for a LL to pay $150 or $200 a unit (or whatever) for six units, than $850 for one unit and then $850 again for two units that turn out also to be infested later.

There have been plenty of stories here of people for whom it has not worked. The PCOs on the board who use thermal will tell you that it's as much art as science. There's a bit of a learning curve for brand new providers with thermal. But, when done properly, thermal can be a very effective way to deal with bed bugs.

The selling point for me was after reading all the horror stories here about infestations that lasted for months or years. My thermal treatment took care of the problem in one shot. For me, that alone is worth the additional cost. (But then, my LL was awesome and split the cost with me, so it's not like I was paying for the whole thing out of pocket.)