Got Bed Bugs? Bedbugger Forums » Bed Bug Treatment
Treatment experience in NYC
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cucara-chat
newbite
Joined: Mar '09
Posts: 1
Posted 1 year ago
Sun Mar 8 2009 10:12:10
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Hi.
I posted this on another bedbug forum already. I hope it doesn't violate the rules, but we've been dealing with a bad infestation, and I thought I should name names of products and providers we have dealt with.
I've had cockroach-free living spaces in Brooklyn and Queens, but have never managed that feat in Manhattan. We've been at our current Manhattan apartment for more than ten years and, until recently, have had seasonal ups and downs with the roaches. Our walls and floors and ceilings are full of cracks and holes, so we occasionally get rodents, too. For several years our cats kept them at bay, but now the cats are too old and blind to provide any deterrence. Then last March, about a week after I lost my job, we finally hit the third leg of the dreaded pestilential trifecta -- bed bugs! We don't know exactly when they arrived, because we've heard they can be around for awhile before you notice. But even though we weren't seeing any signs of them, I was clearly getting bit at night.
We didn't know how to proceed. We didn't want to use heavy pesticides because of our dog and cats. Plus, we are the clutter champions of the northeast, and we realized that would make the problem more difficult to control. Eventually we lifted up our huge heavy queen-sized mattress and saw several apple-seed sized monsters parked in the seams underneath, plus a veritable Jackson Pollock painting of those unsightly black blotches. We cleaned them off, dusted with "Mother Earth" and put on laminated mattress covers, but continued to get bit and to see large and small bugs nearly every night. I even dreamt about them on several nights, and woke up to catch a few right after feeding. (Unlike speedy roaches, bed bugs are pretty sluggish.) We also both seemed to be getting bitten in our chairs outside the bedroom.
As the bed bug problem increased, the roaches and rodents got worse, too. We were hearing squeaking and gnashing in several rooms, day and night, and seeing roaches outside of the kitchen and bathroom. Even species of small roaches we'd never seen before.
We looked into some products that claimed to be eco-friendly, such as the diatomaceous earth mentioned above. We tried a couple of sprays, one called BED BUG PATROL, the other called EcoEXEMPT KO. In our experience, BED BUG PATROL didn't do anything. You could spray it directly on the bugs and it didn't appear to affect them. The EcoEXEMPT seemed to work pretty well. It killed the bugs when we sprayed them directly, and after we sprayed our chairs, we stopped getting bitten outside the bedroom. (N.B. We are private citizens, don't work for or endorse any products, just reporting on our personal experience.)
One night last fall I saw about a dozen bugs crawling around the bottom edge of the mattress. I wiped out as many of them as I could get to, and never saw anything that bad afterward. We got a new mattress cover. I checked it religiously for bugs and black marks. Never saw any black marks; still got a few bites, but they were receding. One time after not getting bitten for awhile, I noticed a large dead bed bug when we pulled the mattress cover out of the washing machine. I'd thought maybe they were gone, so that was depressing.
Meanwhile, a baby was on the way, so we knew we had to come grips with the problem. A friend of ours who had recently dealt with a bed bug infestation told us about a company called Bed Bugs and Beyond that works with movers. You put your belongings in a moving van, and they spray the contents of the van with Vikane, which sucks out all the oxygen and destroys the bugs and their eggs. This was big news to us. One of the moving companies they work with is called Movin' Right Along, and we engaged them for the process of getting nearly everything out of our apartment to be sprayed.
We were so cluttered that we couldn't do most of the packing ourselves. We needed the movers to help, and it was a huge job. Our tiny "three-room" apartment (plus kitchen and bathroom) required four days to move and cost way more than 10G. And we still needed a PCO to come treat our place. We asked BB&B for recommendations, and settled on a small operation called Green Earth that billed themselves as eco-friendly, and had gotten some good press in Time Out New York. They mainly use heavy duty steam, with some chemicals. They sent us a description of a couple of the chemicals, and we spoke with them at some length and scheduled an appointment.
Well, I guess we didn't speak with them enough. Even after emptying 80% of our apartment, we still had a lot of stuff, much of it in cardboard boxes. Green Earth thought we still had way too much stff, and we hadn't prepared according to their specifications (which I think included getting stuff out of cardboard boxes). Unfortunately, we'd never gotten their prep list. They also hadn't told us that we had to vacate the premises while they were working. My then-pregnant wife had been planning to be away, although she hadn't left yet when they arrived, but I had figured on staying there to help move stuff around and show them some details about the place. Then, they also were planning to use some toxic chemicals they hadn't told us about beforehand. By the time this all came out, there wasn't enough time remaining in their schedule to do the job that day, so they left. I'm sure they know their stuff, and do good work, but we decided to find a different PCO.
We needed someone in a hurry. A place called Bell Environmental had recently begun advertising about bedbug control on TV. They use cryonite, which is just frozen CO2 gas, and diatomaceous earth. The folks at Bed Bugs and Beyond were skeptical, but with the baby due soon, we felt enormous pressure and booked Bell. Their standard procedure is two visits, spaced two weeks apart. Each visit cost us $1500 plus tax. (Green Earth would have been much cheaper. I think they also do two visits, but they were charging around $600.)
We had our first appointment with Bell on Friday, February 20th, and just finished the second visit on Saturday, March 7th. After the first visit, there was an immediate drop-off in the cockroach population, though they weren't completely gone, and within a few days they rebounded and then some! This made me a bit fearful about the effectiveness with respect to bed bugs, but we haven't seen any evidence of bed bugs since the first visit, although one day I did notice a spot on my arm that possibly could have been a bed bug bite. I sure hope they solved the problem, because we couldn't afford to go through this again!
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spideyjg
oldtimer
Joined: Jul '08
Posts: 1,608
Posted 1 year ago
Sun Mar 8 2009 16:27:13
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cucara-chat - 6 hours ago »
Our walls and floors and ceilings are full of cracks and holes, so we occasionally get rodents, too.I'm no PCO but IMHO until that is remedied you are fighting a losing battle and will never stand a chance of being pest free in a place like that.
You could wipe out all the pests in the house but given time a new population will enter via the cracks and holes.
Jim
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