As I understand it, neither of these will do any good at all. I think that misinformation is a big part of the problem.
Yes it was definitely useless, but that’s because plastic bags full of cetaphil bottles and expensive Sephora and Aveda products aren’t likely to have bedbugs to begin with. I was pretty tired after 3 days of running around Manhattan and didn’t want to argue, and I can certainly understand their craziness given what they dealt with in India! Plus, phomollient can be replaced and if any of my makeup got ruined they would have replaced it for me anyway.
I guess the Lysol had no effect but after they dumped the clothes on the ground outside the garage, they brought them into the laundry room in bags (wash/dry and dry immediately) and my mom Lysoled the life out of the bag, and then obsessively vacuumed it. Then they obsessively vacuumed the trunk of the car after which they obsessively Lysoled it.
So I think other than the useless Lysol, they hit most of the points on how to deal with them. Like I said…apparently they had to fully refurnish their home in India twice because my dad used to bring them back from travelling all over South Asia.
Horrible little things. I almost want to un-ban DDT because the very thought of them makes me itch.
Oh, and in addition to my above questions, how exactly does one check a laptop for bedbugs, anyway? Can their presence inside a laptop harm it? How do you keep them out?
And yes, I have no evidence that I have any sort of problem yet. But between the coworker (half of his building is infested, and his information about their size creeped me out royally) and visiting my friend who was traveling in Europe on Friday night (and several thereafter), this has really gotten me concerned.
Well, we spent the weekend in a hotel, and we checked the room for bugs first. No bugs, no evidence of bugs - fingers crossed we won’t see any in our house now. We’re going on our two-week vacation next Monday - fingers crossed for that, too.
Come on, now. They’re annoying, and difficult to get rid of, but they’re not ninjas.
List of things that have to be true for you to garner an infestation in this manner: Your co-worker is not careful with his clothes (who knows). Some of his bedbugs like to hang out near where he keeps said clothes (possible, but not exactly likely, depending on just how big the infestation is; he would definitely notice if any any were regularly camping out in the area). One or more of the right kind happen to tag along for his ride to work (meaning a pregnant female, or multiple juveniles/newborns, which can be difficult to spot; again, possible but not exactly likely).
That’s all of the “plausible but cumulatively unlikely” criteria. The big hurdles are still to come. If it’s a pregnant female, that you happen to brush up against him in just the right spot and the bedbug just happens to transfer to your clothes, and then doesn’t leave or get brushed off and you wind up carrying it back home. If it’s a host of juveniles, you need for your co-worker not to have noticed that he has bugs crawling all over him (and, again, for a terribly un-fortuitous brush up).
The odds are way less than 1%, basically.
“Visit” as in “have dinner and then go back home”? Not worried, since it’s very unlikely that your friend brought back bedbugs, *and *that they’d happen to leach onto you in the few hours you spent there (when they’re mostly dormant). If you mean staying the night, then it’s still very unlikely for the reasons mentioned, but somewhat less so.
Get a cover for your mattress that I think was mentioned upthread (seals the old ones in, keeps new ones out). Do a wash and quarantine things like clothes and beddings. Get and use lots of diatomaceous earth. I’m frankly a little shocked at the OP’s casual attitude toward this last piece of advice: this is your main weapon! Spread it around your bed, and anything that comes to feed on you dies. Spread it around the baseboards and they can’t hide in the walls. Put a barrier around doorways and the infestation will have a very hard time spreading to new rooms. Short of torching your possessions and moving, or getting lucky with an exterminator who knows what he’s doing and is thorough, this is how you kill the bastards.
Yeah, sorry if I sounded a bit freaked, but… I am. The suddenness of it being even THAT close to home was kind of freaky. Plus I have a thing about bugs; I still remember the night a roach crawled up my arm when I was a kid!
“Visit” as in arrive early evening, play games (we don’t wear shoes in his place, BTW), then go home around midnight or a little later. But it sounds like you’ve covered those circumstances.
I guess the time when I actually DO have to be vigilant is when I take a family vacation (possibly) in November. Any tips for hotels that haven’t been already covered?
Leaper, my parents lysol-vacuumed the bag, then threw it in the dryer and my father checked the laptop to make sure they hadn’t crawled into any of the visible nooks/crannies (like the jacks) and then used the pressurized air thingie (we have tons around the house) to blow out the keyboard. He didn’t go as far as to unscrew it or anything.
Actually, right now he’s in India for work and my mom has said she’s planning on quarantining all his luggage when he gets back because they’re even worse over there.
Maybe release a pack of house spiders inside to eat them all?
Bedbugs are one of my big fears. Eek. Fleas were horrible the one time my dog got them, and I understand bedbugs are 10x as bad. I think a motel room I stayed in while in Puerto Rico a couple of years was lightly infested with them, but I never saw any.
Even better, if you can manage it, is to put the luggage inside your car and park the vehicle in the sun for a few hours. Bedbugs die in temperatures over 120 F, and we all know that a sealed-up car parked in the sun (especially in the summer) gets lethally hot inside.
We had them at our house and it appears that we brought them back from a hotel stay. We ended up having to throw out our mattress and boxspring even after having an exterminator come out. One thing we always do now is take a shower immediately upon getting home, putting the clothes we were wearing directly in the wash and changing into clean clothes that you did not take on the trip with you.
Not really. Just know that a nice place is barely less likely to have a problem than a crap-hole, so do a quick inspection when you first get to your room: all around and under the mattress, and wherever you’ll be keeping your clothes. Also, you could do out of caution what I do out of laziness: don’t unpack, just put your suitcase on the floor and pull clothes out as needed.
We just got back from Turkey where all 4 of us experienced bedbugs in Istanbul (Hotel Arcadia). It took a couple of days to figure out what we were being bitten by, but figured it out. Now that we are home, we are washing all of our clothes and the suitcases are still in the garage. I should put them in garbage bags and set them out in the sun for a couple of days. We’ll also be picking up the diatomaceous earth to spread around just in case (although we’ve got a lot of earwigs so we’ll be glad to use it on them as well). I’ve started putting things in the oven at 150 and the dryer already. It’s a pain now, but less of a pain than trying to get rid of them. As VarlosZ points out, all we need is 1 pregnant female to come home with us.
I’ve been reading up on them and realize that they are not disease vectors and that the resurgence seems to be global over the last 10-15 years, but we damn well don’t want them. Our house is approaching the first stage of squalor (not dirty, just messy) so this may provide the boost we need to clean things up properly.
I think I’ll be traveling from now on with a container of diatomaceous earth. I always wash all the clothes when I get home anyway, so might as well just dust them all inside the suitcase for the flight home.
Better leave the empty container in there for the border police to review. 