Bed Bug Season, Hurrayyyy
No one is safe. Not a New Yorker. Not an Angeleno. Not a person who has been in a hotel room. Not a soul. While I sit here and freak out about the call I got earlier from my roommate (“I think I found a bed bug”) and the subsequent follow-up call (“Nevermind, it’s a beetle”), let’s figure out what this nightmare costs.
• From Ester Bloom’s 2012 piece on this site, “Brokers vs Bedbugs: Which Is Worse?”
The site Bedbug Pest Control provides tips for dealing with an infestation:
Since bed bugs are very sensitive to heat, a steam cleaner is the best way to safely kill them on contact. A steam cleaner such as a McCulloch Heavy Duty Steam Cleaner is powerful enough to get over 140 degrees Fahrenheit and will kill the bugs without toxins and leaves no residue.Steam Cleaner list price: $150, or $99 on Amazon.
You’ll want to protect your box spring and mattress with something like the Sleep Defense System ($23.95 on Amazon for the box spring, plus $38 for the waterproof mattress cover). Even then, though, you’ll probably want to bring in a professional, which can run you $100 or more for the inspection and $500-$1000 for treatment.
TOTAL COST: $765-$1,765
• From Molly McAleer’s 2010 Awl article, “Bed Bugs: Is No One Safe?”
Eliminating the infestation was by far the largest expense I have had while living in Los Angeles.
Here’s that breakdown: My landlord is legally responsible to pay for my extermination (a very good landlord will even put you up in a hotel while they fumigate your place, FYI), but he is dodging the $180 bill and I am too tired to fight about it. The cleaning service was another $200. I will be replacing the mattress and box spring I threw away when I am confident they are gone. Until then, I’m crashing on a reasonably priced and fairly comfortable air mattress. Don’t make that face. I’m fine. …
… I’ve also sunk a TimeWarner bill’s worth of cash into hydrocortisone, which I use as a moisturizer when I get out of the shower. …
… Then there are the clothes. I did over twenty loads of laundry in a two-day period. I had to figure out what my belongings meant to me because everything I kept was a liability. …
… Everything I kept had to be packed away in 2-gallon Ziploc bags. That whole process, between the bags and the quarters, totaled another hundred bucks. My time is very valuable, and it cost a lot of that too. …
From the comments of Jasmine Moy’s 2010 Awl article, “How I Fought Bedbugs and Won”
• From the comments of Tara Parker-Pope’s 2009 New York Times post “The High Price of Bed Bugs”
(This last comment is probably bullshit but it makes me feel better, slightly.)
(Also: I’m declaring bed bugs a get-your-credit-card-back-from-Mike-Dang level emergency, should the beetle turn out to be something more terrible.)
Ok, a couple things to note. The steam cleaner is basically useless unless maybe you want to use it on clothes? It will not work on mattresses or upholstered items because the bugs just burrow down where the steam can’t touch them.
Second, you don’t need to, and in fact shouldn’t, get rid of your mattress or other belongings, all that does is spread the infestation around to other people.
The heat treatment is great, and that’s definitely the route I’d go in a single family home, but I’m not sure it would be effective in the long term in an apartment. As with any other treatment the bugs just migrate to other apartments and then come back when your apartment is a safe environment for them again. Treating the whole building is really the best/only way to go.
We’ve never had them, but my landlord really doesn’t want to deal with bugs (he lives in the building) so he comes around and sprays our baseboards occasionally with some kind of bug stuff that is probably just fancy rubbing alcohol.
@The Dauphine As someone with a very, very serious allergy to pesticides and herbicides…I can assure you it is almost certainly NOT just fancy rubbing alcohol. That stuff is toxic and if you have kids/pets you might want to have your landlord focus on the common areas of the building and not in your apartment. I’ve fought a constant battle to have my work places and apartment buildings TELL ME when they put that stuff down, lest all of a sudden I end up with a life-threatening reaction.
About bed bug season quite informative insights allocated! I enjoyed reading through this wonderful writing. Bed bugs are giving great concern to American’s many cities and Chicago is the number one affected city in America. Thanks.
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