Treating your Vehicle. Need success stories. Just found out they're there to!

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Treating your Vehicle. Need success stories. Just found out they're there to!

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Grindstone99

junior member
Joined: May '09
Posts: 56

Posted 10 months ago
Sat May 9 2009 21:50:54
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After exhaustingly searching this forum for how to treat your car, I have heard numerous treatment suggestions, many contradicting each other.
I found one dead today one in my trunk - it's a hatchback.

Help! I love my little car!

So many reasons this is a nightmare - I think I'm clean when I leave my house, then I go to work, or go visit my 93 year old grandmother, which I've been doing every week for months before I knew I had bugs. It would just kill her if she had them, from stress alone. Baaaawl!
spideyjg

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Joined: Jul '08
Posts: 1,614

Posted 10 months ago
Sat May 9 2009 22:11:48
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Depends where you are but you may want to see if a PCO company in your area does Vikane.

Jim
buggyinsocal

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Joined: Jun '08
Posts: 1,259

Posted 10 months ago
Sun May 10 2009 12:54:50
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Trust me, if both Spideyjg and I say that Vikane is the best way to go with the car, we mean it.

Both Jim and I live in southern California. A lot of people want to try to heat treat the car by leaving it in full sun on a hot day.

Jim and I have access to some of the hottest, driest, sunniest days in the United States as we both live within a few hours drive of deserts where the temps routinely reach over 120 degrees F on summer days. Clearly, parking a car in full sun on a 122 degree day would raise the temp in most parts of the car that you can see to well over the thermal death point.

But not everyone lives next to a desert that hot, and even if you got the temp in parts of the car up that high, you can't count on getting *every part* of the car's interior that hot. And you have no control over how quickly the temp increases, which is necessary for heat treatments to be effective.

I considered parking my car in full sun on hot days in the desert, and after extensive discussions with PCOs I am convinced that the safest and most foolproof way to debug a car that is infested is to treat it with Vikane. It has to do with the art and science of raising the temp at a certain speed and evenly enough that means Vikane is always going to be more effective than attempts to self-treat a car with thermal. And I had my apartment treated with thermal, so clearly, I'm a fan of baking bed bugs to death.

My car wasn't infested, but when I was in full blown panic mode, I was terrified they were everywhere. In the end, my car didn't need treating, but if it did in the future, I would go with Vikane.
Grindstone99

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Joined: May '09
Posts: 56

Posted 10 months ago
Sun May 10 2009 19:40:02
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Thank you.
Grindstone99

junior member
Joined: May '09
Posts: 56

Posted 10 months ago
Wed May 13 2009 10:19:15
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(SIGH!) I just found out we can't use/don't have Vikane in Canada. WHAT NOW?????????????????
buggyinsocal

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Joined: Jun '08
Posts: 1,259

Posted 10 months ago
Wed May 13 2009 18:56:34
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You can always try putting the car in full sun on a hot day. We just don't know that it will work, and a lot of the thermal PCOs seem skeptical given the whole raise the temperature evenly, avoid cool spots problems.

I also have this crazy crackpot theory that I blame on _Car Talk_, a radio program on National Public Radio. A woman called in with a car infested with baby black widow spiders which could only be killed with extreme heat or cold. She had her car heat treated by taking it to a 3 day autobody place. (Those places use giant car-sized cookers to dry and cure the paint faster than a paint job on a car would normally take.)

We have absolutely no proof that it would work, and it would be ethically irresponsible not to tell the shop that you had bed bugs, but I've always been curious as to whether it would work on bed bugs. (Or at least, I've been curious since I had bed bugs.)

Of course, I also have no idea if Canada has three day auto-body paint places, so . . . I'll let you tell me if they do and if you can find one to try.

I have heard here of some PCOs using DDVP strips to treat cars, so you might be able to find a PCO in your area who can tell you if that's an option as well.

Sorry I don't have better suggestions. As spideyjg said somewhere, I don't know why there aren't more chamber thermal treatments available in Canada. It would seem a good alternative to Vikane.