Bed Bugs! You will Laugh, you will Cry, you will Itch!

My first experience with bed bugs was in one of our Fresno Buildings a few years ago. We had a problem tenant who complained her unit had bed bugs. She had just finished taking possession of an old sofa from the dumpster, AKA: Dumpster Diving, which made her complaint more credible. We immediately called in an expert pest control company who upon inspection of the dead pest labeled it “crabs.” This was GREAT NEWS for our on-site manager, who immediately let the tenant know she had a case of crabs. As you can imagine, the rumor spread through the building like a wildfire. This did not go down too well with the complainer as you might imagine. We paid for the $500 bed bug spray to calm her down after the false accusation.

About 9 months ago we found bed bugs in one of our other buildings. Elimination of bed bugs can be very, very expensive, (roughly $200+ per unit to spray, $500 to heat treat), and time consuming. You have a few options to remove them: Get-Rid-of-Bed-Bugs.

To see a picture of a bed bug: Bed Bug Picture

We chose the heat treatment in combination with a spray. In the heat treatment, you need to get the room temperature above 120 degrees for a few hours. You can pay for the service at $500 per room, or, our inexpensive solution: My friend the fireman suggested purchasing a few $25.00 portable heaters at Home Depot. We found that if we plug in 4 heaters and run them for 5 hours we can hold the room temperature at120+ degrees, which then kills the bugs. The big expense is in the extension cords, not the heaters.

We were doing this treatment methodically through the summer and we noticed the roach and flea complaints were both increasing exponentially. The roaches usually stay in the walls but they started coming out in full force. After we researched this a bit we found the roaches got stimulated by the heat, which made them reproduce faster. The fleas I do not know, maybe just the summer season. We now had a building creeping and crawling with all three pests at the same time! Long story short, we now do the heat treatment and spray every two weeks.

Steve