Effective Bed Bug Killers

What are effective bed bug killers? Having dealt with bedbugs this is a question that I have researched often.

First, you have to know that bed bugs are hard to kill.  The reason is that while there are pesticides that can kill the bugs, a lot of them do nothing to the eggs.

This means that when those eggs hatch you are going to be re-infested.  So the goal of exterminators is to find the right combination that will kill both the bugs and their eggs.  This is not an easy task.

Heat And Cold

One tactic that is used in areas where it is cold is putting everything out into the cold for 24 hours or so to kill everything.  The temperature needs to be continually below freezing for this tactic to work.

This usually has limited success although I have seen different sprays used that create freezing temperatures and kill the bugs.

At the other end of the spectrum is heat.  Getting infested items above 130 degrees or so for an hour or longer will kill the bugs and their eggs.

This might work on smaller items like clothes and suitcases.  But it’s hard to get the interior temperatures of things like furniture that have a larger mass up to that temperature.  So it usually doesn’t work for those.  I have seen instances though where large pieces of furniture were put in one of those big shipping containers and successfully heated and the bugs killed.

That tactic costs a lot of money though and furniture isn’t really designed to be heated to those temperatures.  For things like suitcases though you can put them in a black trash bag and stick it in the sun for a few hours.  Doing this inside a closed up car will ensure that high enough temperatures are reached.

Pesticides

The one thing that has always worked for us is fogging.  Just be careful and follow the instructions carefully.

The important thing to know though is that fogging only kills the bugs and not the bedbug eggs so you need to re-fog several times as new bugs are hatched.  Usually, the eggs take about ten days to hatch so doing the fogging three times about ten days apart should do the job.

There are also contact killers and residual sprays.  Contact killers kill on contact but don’t last.  Residual sprays are designed to last for longer-lasting periods.

We also use diatomaceous earth.  This product is entirely safe and can be found in most hardware stores.  It is basically finely ground shells that rip open the bugs as they crawl over them, causing them to dry out and die.  Just make sure that you purchase the food grade.

A combination of fogging, spraying, a mattress enclosure to trap whatever is deep inside the mattress, and diatomaceous earth is effective bed bug killers and the tactics of choice when we are trying to find out what kills bed bugs.