Bed Bug Removal Services in Ann Arbor

The eggs, mostly. A female bed bug is able to lay up to five eggs in a day, and she releases them into cracks and crevices where they are nearly impossible to see. Each egg is around a millimeter long, milky white, and grain-like, and where conditions are favorable the great majority of them will hatch, usually within six to nine days. Sprays do not really touch them. A chemical treatment can clear every adult bug out of a home and still fail, because a week or two on, the eggs that were missed hatch out and the whole problem begins again. This is the cycle that keeps people paying for treatment after treatment. Breaking it involves reaching the eggs. It also revolves around reaching all of them at once, in every room, which is something only whole-home heat can really do.

Here is the part most people never hear about. When a company says it offers heat treatment, that can mean several very different things, and it is easy to mistake one setup with another. The cheapest arrangement is electric heaters. These are the units a lot of companies run because they cost somewhere in the region of $25,000-$30,000, but a single one puts out only 36,000 to 70,000 BTUs while drawing close to the entire power supply of a home. They are slow, as well. Getting a home up to a killing temperature can take over two hours with electric, and a slow rise gives the bugs time to sense the change and work themselves deeper into the walls, where the heat may never reach them at all. Propane units are stronger. The direct-fired sort can reach 900,000 BTUs, but they burn their fuel right in your living space, putting off carbon dioxide and humidity as they go, and heat that concentrated has been known to melt fridge handles, warp vinyl floors, and char wood furniture. The indirect-fired sort is cleaner to breathe around but much weaker, roughly 80,000 BTUs a unit, so a home really needs eight or more of them, along with a long row of propane tanks, and most companies only show up with three.

The system we use is called Heat Assault, and it works on a different principle. It is a sealed 660,000 BTU boiler that heats a food-grade glycol – a fluid rather than a flame – and pumps it out to as many as nine heaters placed through the home. Because the fluid is held at a set temperature, somewhere between 205°F and 100°F depending on the size and insulation of the house, the heat that arrives in each room is even, and there is nothing burning inside your home while it runs. Most homes are past 120°F within the first half hour and can be brought toward 140°F inside the hour. At those temperatures, the heat soaks into wall voids, mattresses, and furniture, the exact places sprays fall short, and it takes the eggs along with the adults. The equipment costs well over $100,000, which is most of the reason more companies do not carry it.

The University of Michigan sits at the center of Ann Arbor, and the turnover that comes with it gives bed bugs steady chances to travel. A very large student population moves in and out of the rentals near Kerrytown, State Street, and South University, often with secondhand furniture, and sublets change hands throughout the year. The hotels fill on football weekends and for Michigan Medicine, so there is a regular supply of luggage moving through town as well. Much of the older housing has shared walls and old outlets, and bed bugs pass through them from one unit into the next. A problem that starts in one room can reach the rest of the building that way. None of it has anything to do with housekeeping.

An inspection comes first, because the treatment is only ever as good as our sense of where the bugs are hiding. A perimeter spray follows, along the baseboards, the furniture, and the cracks, to hold the bugs where they are while the temperature builds. Then the heaters go to work. You and your pets will be out of the home while it is held at temperature, the better part of a day for most houses, and back in that same evening. A handful of belongings do not care for that much heat, certain houseplants, some medications, pressurized cans among them, and those are set aside before we begin. Whoever runs your treatment will walk the list with you ahead of the day.

Most treatments finish in a single day rather than the string of follow-ups that chemical-only methods tend to need, and the work carries a sixty-day guarantee. Every home is different, and every infestation is different, and the price is different with them. It follows the size of the home and how far along the problem has gotten. Having us come out, look the place over, and give you a figure costs nothing.