Bed Bug Removal Services in Bristol

Bristol sits right against the Michigan line, which makes it one of the shortest runs on our whole Indiana map. It is a small town with a river through it and campgrounds around it, and being small has never spared anywhere from bed bugs. They arrive here the way they arrive everywhere — on furniture, in luggage, and through the walls of any place where people sleep close together.

Because the town is compact, a problem here tends to be a house problem rather than a building problem, and a house problem is exactly what one-day whole-home heat was made for.

It mostly comes down to the eggs. A female can lay something in the region of five eggs in a single day, and she tucks them into cracks and crevices where nobody is going to spot them. Each one is about a millimeter long, milky white, and shaped like a tiny grain, and when conditions are favorable nearly all of them will hatch, most within six to nine days. Sprays do not do much of anything to them. A chemical job can wipe out every adult in the house and still come up short, because a week or two later the eggs nobody reached hatch out, and everything starts over. That cycle is what keeps people paying for one treatment after another. Ending it means getting to the eggs. It also means getting to every one of them at the same time, in every room, and whole-home heat is about the only method that manages that.

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.

Most of Bristol’s bed bugs are travelers. The campgrounds and RV parks along the St. Joseph River fill with summer guests, and campers and cabins pass bugs along the way hotels do, one stay at a time. The toll road runs just south of town, close enough that its motels are Bristol’s motels for practical purposes. Elkhart’s RV plants draw commuters from every direction as well, and some of them live out of weekly rentals before finding their feet. A used mattress from a garage sale on 15 finishes the story often enough. In a town this size there is no neighborhood-by-neighborhood pattern to speak of — the bugs come in when they come in, and the sooner they are noticed the smaller the job is.

We begin with an inspection, because the treatment is only as good as our understanding of where the bugs are hiding. After that, a perimeter spray goes down along the baseboards, the furniture, and the cracks, which helps keep the bugs where they are as the temperature comes up. Then the heaters run. You and your pets will need to be out of the home while it is held at temperature, which for most homes means the better part of a day, and you are back in that same evening. A small number of belongings do not do well in that kind of heat, certain houseplants, some medications, pressurized cans, and those get set aside beforehand. Whoever runs your treatment will go through the list with you before the day of.

The treatment is generally finished in a single day, rather than the string of follow-up visits chemical-only methods tend to need, and the work is covered by a sixty-day guarantee. Every home is different, and every infestation is different, so the price is different too. It follows from the size of the home and how far along the problem is.