I’m not sure if this belongs in general questions or not.
I love to shop at thrift and consignment stores for clothing. I have a few favorite stores, and some of my very best designer garments come from these places.
However, I’m starting to get uneasy about the possibility of bedbugs. I already would never buy furniture at a thrift store ever again (Sheldon Cooper was right, dammit!), but now I’m starting to feel hinky about clothing, too.
I always empty thrift store clothing straight from the shopping bag directly into the washing machine and run it through a couple of washes before it ever enters the house. Is this enough? Or am I just paranoid?
I was going to suggest just stashing the stuff for a while. However, after looking at this website, I see you would need to keep it isolated for about two years to be sure.
Having just completed a work-mandated bed bug training, we were informed that hot water does not kill them, the dryer will on hot but you have to dry for 1 hour above 140 F to be effective.
As an alternative, Since not every item can be machine dried, if you have a deep-freeze style freezer, you can also place clothes in the freezer for a week. Standard household freezers are not cold enough.
Velour jumpsuit and some house slippers
Dookie brown leather jacket that I found diggin’
They had a broken keyboard, I bought a broken keyboard
I bought a skeet blanket, then I bought a kneeboard
I’ve never washed vintage/used/garage sale clothing before wearing it and I’ve never had any problems. (Is it any wonder that I scored 2% on the germaphobe quiz?)
This. I had to do some BB killing and this worked fine.
Use a meat thermometer at the height of the drying cycle - stick it in the middle of the clothes in the dryer and make sure you’re over 120F. My dryers do a 1 hour cycle, so as long as they were at the right temp at 30 minutes, just complete the cycle and good to go.
My BB problem came from a neighbor, and that hasn’t stopped me from thrifting clothing at all. I do only buy washer/dryer clothing and put it through a dryer cycle before bringing it into the house. I started doing this when I originally had a clothes moth problem that originated from one of my first thrifting forays over a decade ago. So a nice hot dryer cycle helps with more than just BB’s!
How do you know that regular (non-thrift) store clothing wasn’t tried on by another customer who had bedbugs? Or taken home to a bug-infested apartment and then returned? Or handled by a bug-bearing employee?
I’m more worried about scabies since hearing that thrift store clothing is the #1 source of scabies infections around here. I still shop at thrift stores, but I don’t try anything on in the store. Buy it, wash it, then I’ll try it on. Worst case scenario, I can re-donate if I guessed horribly wrong on the size.
They probably assumed that the dryer would not be at top heat for the whole hour, and that most people would not measure the temp. In other words, I assume what we were told had a huge margin of error.
I’m resurrecting this thread to post a link to this story about a local Goodwill having to dispose of a couple of entire warehouses full of goods because of bedbug infestation.
Euuwwgh. I think my days of buying cheap, high quality clothing from thrift stores are over. I can’t risk infesting my home with this vermin.
I’ve so far avoided bedbugs while thrifting, but I have a hell of a moth infestation, presumably from one of the many wool jackets I’ve bought from Goodwill.
