Bed Bug Removal Services in Battle Creek

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.

This is the part that hardly anyone explains. Heat treatment can mean several quite different setups, and it is easy to mistake one for the next. Electric heaters are the cheapest of them, which is why a lot of companies run them. They cost somewhere in the region of $25,000-$30,000, yet a single unit manages only 36,000 to 70,000 BTUs and pulls nearly the whole electrical supply of a home while doing it. They are also slow. It can take better than two hours for electric units to bring a home up to a killing temperature, and a slow climb gives the bugs time to feel the change coming and move deeper into the walls, where the heat may never get to them at all. Propane is the stronger option. Direct-fired propane units can put out as much as 900,000 BTUs, but they are burning fuel inside your living space, giving off carbon dioxide and humidity the whole while, and heat that concentrated has melted fridge handles, warped vinyl floors, and charred wood furniture. Indirect-fired propane is easier on the air but a good deal weaker, around 80,000 BTUs to a unit, so a home wants eight or more of them and a long line of propane tanks, and most companies arrive with three.

Our system is called Heat Assault, and it runs on a different principle altogether. It is a sealed 660,000 BTU boiler heating a food-grade glycol, a fluid rather than a flame, which gets pumped out to as many as nine heaters through the home. The fluid is held at a set temperature, somewhere between 205°F and 100°F according to the size and insulation of the house, so the heat arriving in each room is even, and nothing at all is burning inside the home while it works. Most houses are past 120°F inside the first half hour and can be brought up toward 140°F within the hour. Heat like that soaks into wall voids, mattresses, and furniture, the very places sprays never quite reach, and it takes the eggs right along with the adults. The equipment runs well past $100,000, and that price is most of why more companies do not own one.

Battle Creek sits just up the road from our office in Marshall, so we know the town well. A fair amount of the bed bug movement here runs through the hotels and rentals near downtown and W.K. Kellogg Airport, along with the steady coming and going of workers and visitors tied to Kellogg’s and Fort Custer. Secondhand furniture moves around a great deal too, and any used couch or mattress is able to carry bed bugs into a home without anyone realizing it. Once they are inside a building, they make their way through shared walls and along baseboards into the units next door. None of this happens because of poor housekeeping. A town with this much movement simply hands bed bugs plenty of chances, and once they land somewhere they spread quietly until somebody notices.

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. There is no charge for us to come out, look the place over, and give you a figure.