Bed bug heat treatment
Discover what bed bug heat treatment is and how much it costs
What is bed bug heat treatment?
Bed bug heat treatment is a bed bug eradication process that utilises heat to kill bed bugs. Heat treatment, if done correctly by a professional, is highly effective at eliminating bed bugs. The bed bug heat treatment process involves heating a room to over 50 degrees Celsius for over 90 minutes. Bed bugs cannot survive heat treatment in any stage of their lifecycle, from egg to adult. Discover the benefits and costs of bed bug heat treatment below.
100% effective
Kills all life stages of bed bugs
Rapid process
Non-toxic treatment
Merlin’s Bed Bug Heat Treatment Prices |
|
| Initial Inspection & recommendations | £0 |
| First room | £600 |
| Each additional room | £400 |
Prior to the treatment, the technician will move furniture items away from walls and spread them around the space. This ensures that the heat flows evenly around the room and that all of the room’s contents are “cooked” evenly.
While the room is cooking, the technicians will enter several times to monitor for cold spots using thermal imaging technology. They may adjust the room’s layout and the hot airflow direction if cold spots are found.
The specialist will carefully monitor for ‘bed bug migration’ as bed bugs may attempt to flee from the heat in an attempt to save themselves from their impending fate. Fleeing bed bugs will be destroyed by the technician.
Once the treatment has concluded, the pest control technician will replace all of your furniture to its original position leaving the room in its original order and 100% bed-bug free – ready for immediate occupancy.
Chemical treatment is the most common form of bed bug pest treatment in the UK due to its relatively low price point. Some chemical treatments can kill bed bug eggs, though many are less effective on eggs compared to adults and nymphs. The efficacy depends on the specific chemicals used.
Furthermore, chemical-based bed bug pest control methods often rely on the pest control technician finding the bed bugs by sight, in their hiding places, in order for him to hit them with a squirt of spray. Heat treatment, however, will kill all bed bugs in the room, regardless of how good their hiding place is. The table below outlines a comparison between the two-bed bug control methods.
Generally, chemical treatments will not involve sniffer dogs to assist in seeking out the hiding bed bugs because of the risk of the dogs coming into contact with the insecticide. This means that the technician is relying on his sight alone to find the bed bugs.
To complete a chemical treatment relatively successfully, a technician would need to revisit the room three times over a week and conduct a new search and spray on each visit. As a result, the room would be unusable during this whole period.
When the chemical-treated room is finally returned, there’s no guarantee the bed bugs will be gone. Furthermore, there may be health implications for the room’s occupants resulting from the chemicals, which may not have fully dispersed by the time the room is used for sleeping. For these reasons, it’s always better to choose heat treatment.
| Heat treatment | Chemical spray | |
| Reliability | 100% | ~60% |
| Kills all life stages | Yes | No |
| 100% safe for humans? | Yes | No |
| Treatment speed | Fast | Slow |
| Cost | High | Low |
Spot heat treatment relies on the discovery of bed bugs them to be treated. The issue is that the bed bugs are very small and good at hiding. That’s why spot heat treatment is often used in conjunction with bed bug-hunting sniffer dogs. Based on our benchmarks, best-in-class sniffer dogs working with a good dog handler will find all bed bugs in a room ~98% of the time.
Once found by the dog, the bugs can be spot-heat-treated with high heat or steam by a trained technician. Sniffer dogs combined with spot heat treatment can be used as a stand-alone bed bug removal solution, as it’s close to 100% reliable, non-toxic, and more affordable than full-room heat treatment.
Whole-room heat treatment is better than dog-assisted heat treatment because whole-room treatment doesn’t rely on the bed bugs hiding place to be known to the technical – it kills all bed bugs in the room irrespectively. It still requires proper execution to ensure all areas reach the lethal temperature. But dog-assisted bed bug heat treatment is still extremely useful.
Sniffer dog-assisted spot heat treatment is far superior to the chemical spray method because dog’s noses are much better at finding bed bugs and their eggs than human’s eyes are. Moreover, the usage of heat means the eggs will be destroyed, whereas with chemical treatment, the eggs will survive.
While nothing beats whole room heat treatment for destroying bed bugs in a room, it may not always be an economical method of purging an entire property with several rooms. For such cases, bed bug sniffer dogs can be used to reliably screen the remaining rooms in the premises and whole room heat-treatment can be used for tackling the rooms with confirmed bug activity. This approach keeps costs down while ensuring a high impact bed bug removal solution is delivered.
Sniffer dogs are also excellent at screening buildings with no known bed bugs, but that have a moderate to high possibility of an infestation occurring (such as hotels). The dogs can periodically comb an entire building quickly, flagging bed bug problems in their infancy, so the technician can spot heat treat them before they become a nuisance to you or your guests.
| Whole room heat treatment | Spot heat treatment with dogs | |
| Reliability | 100% | ~98% |
| Kills all life stages | Yes | Yes |
| 100% safe for humans? | Yes | Yes |
| Treatment speed | Fast | Fast |
| Cost | High | Medium |
Expert pest controllers such as Merlin understand insect behaviours through years of experience and studying pests. We know what to look out for to ensure rooms are heated evenly and sufficiently to deliver a guaranteed 100% success rate.
It’s also possible that bed bugs are in more than one room in your building since they can travel relatively quickly at about (1.5 meters per minute). By getting in touch with a specialist pest control company equipped with sniffer dogs, they will be able to scour the whole property with extremely high accuracy to help ensure the problem hasn’t already spread.
Moths
Flies
Cockroaches
Have a problem? Speak with an expert today.
The best bed bug control methods
We can be anywhere in the UK within 24 hours, with our mobile operatives covering all areas.
Bed bug heat treatment
Merlin is offering nationwide commercial bed bug heat treatment to businesses of all types and sizes across the UK and Ireland, Merlin is currently offering a free on-site visit to any business with a suspected bed bug issue. Feel free to call the team using the phone number at the top of this website if you just have some questions about our heat treatment process, the costs or even if you just need a bit of free advice on how best to tackle bed bugs.
Bed bug detection with sniffer dogs
Our accreditations
We hold ourselves to a very high standard and we have the accreditations to prove it. We pride ourselves on offering an unrivalled experience in control as well as better quality service, response, and reliability than other pest control companies.
