I’ve said it before, and I will say it again. You need an exterminator to deal with bed bugs. They can hide just about any where, they reproduce like crazy, and they can live for a year or more without feeding. You need a person who has experience in killing them, and chances are that person is not you.

There are a lot of sites on the web that give advice on how to kill them yourself. You might be tempted to try some of their techniques, to see if it works. Believe me, I’ve read at lot of crap out there. Fragrant oils around your bed. Sleeping in a tent. Leaving the apartment for a while to starve them to death.

Forget it.

To kill bed bugs, you need heavy artillery. You need the stuff that will kill the adults and sterilize their offspring. And that means chemicals. Chemicals with names like Tri-Die, Onslaught and Bedlam. Applying things like that requires a professional.

Now, that having been said, there are techniques you can do that will magnify and multiply the effectiveness of your PCO’s work. And these are cheap, or free. These will augment the effect of your exterminators’s chemical attack, and in the process, make your home completely unappealing for any bed bugs who might come calling in the future.

Not only that, but many of these techniques are critical in controlling a bed bug infestation. It might even be part of your PCO’s treatment protocol to have homeowners do some or all of these things.

So before you get started, discuss these techniques with your PCO first, because you don’t want to do anything that will affect his plans.

Bed bugs can live just about anywhere – drawers, clothing, carpets, closets, the gaps between the planks of your hardwood floor, between the baseboards and the floor, behind pictures on the wall, inside electrical outlets and switches – even inside your clock radio.

In a recent survey of bed bug infested apartments, more than 90 % of the bed bugs were found in beds, sofas and recliners. Another study, pest control companies indicated the most common places to find them were on the mattress, carpets and baseboards, and box springs. Using this knowledge, you can target your eradication efforts.

The good news is that if you have properly treated and isolated your bed, you have already gotten rid of a big part of the problem. But not all of it. More good news is that the bulk of your problem will be in the bedroom (assuming that you have not started sleeping on the living room sofa. In that case, they’ll be there, too). But the bad news is that that pretty much anywhere and everywhere that you spend time could be infested.

The plan I have outlined below is comprehensive enough that it could be sufficient to rid your home of a light to moderate infestation of bed bugs, even without the use of chemical insecticides. But it is not guaranteed. Every home is different, every infestation is different.

Outline of the plan

Your objective is to clear out as many bed bugs as possible, remove as many hiding places as possible, and make the remaining hiding places deadly to bed bugs.

You are going to…

1.  Hot wash and bag all your clothing, linens, and sheets

2.  Remove the clutter from the bedroom and either clean and bag it, put it in storage for the next year and a half, or throw it away.

3.  Clean your furniture – shelves, bookcases, clothes hamper, cabinets, dresser, night stand, chairs, etc – by vacuuming or steaming. Clean and bag the items stored in the furniture, too.

4.  Seal up cracks in walls and baseboards

5.  Treat the floor and carpet by vacuuming and/or steaming

6.  If you have bats or birds infesting your home, destroy their nesting sites and seal up the entry points

7.  Dust with DE (either standard or pyrethrin-enhanced) underneath furniture, along baseboards, basically anywhere bed bugs might hide, as well as around your bed.

8.  Clean the rest of the house.

9.  Maintain the offensive by vacuuming and replenishing your layer of DE regularly.

This technique – working with a pest control specialist, vacuuming and bagging, reducing clutter, etc - will get rid you of your bed bugs. But it will take time. Even if you killed every adult bed bug in your home, there are still eggs that will hatch in a couple of weeks, and then the nymphs will come looking for you. But as long as you follow these steps, the population will decrease. You will be bitten less and less frequently, and eventually, your home will be clear. So you must maintain this regimen for at least 8 to 12 weeks to affect the population.

 Because this section is rather lenghtly, I have broken it down into individual chapters.  Follow the links to read each onel.

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