Don't waste your money with do-it-yourself bed bug pesticides
by Tommy Underhill, GreenTech Heat
December 18, 2021
I see a lot of people who attempt to treat bedbugs with over the counter chemicals or online treatments. Unfortunately, they spend several hundred dollars (or more!) only to call me after the bed bugs keep coming back. Stop trying treat yourself. One of the last people we treated spent over a thousand dollars on chemicals and foggers they purchased from the internet.
Way back in October of 2019 I wrote about bed bug sprays that seem to work as advertised... but not as well as the marketing suggests.
For over a year I’ve been spraying bed bug foggers and still get bit. Some times I spray every night. I don’t often see adults, but babies are everywhere. I’m afraid to sleep! Directions on the Hot Shot bottle say I only need to treat every two weeks... why must I every other night?
I have the answer. A 2014 study tested the field efficacy of EcoRaider, a pyrethroid (Hot Shot), and a neonicotinoid mixture spray. After 12 weeks of treating per the label’s directions, both EcoRaider and Hot Shot caused a 93% bed bug count reduction. The third mixture spray didn’t do quite as well.
Back in high school and college, achieving 93% in a class was “good enough”. I got the A! Working to get 93% in all my classes would result in a perfect 4.0 grade point average. In the world of treating bed bug infestations, anything less than a 100% kill is a total failure, results in reinfestation, and will require a retreatment.
Spoiler alert: Armor & Shield has a comprehensive bed bug heat treatment strategy and the technological solution that keep you in control in the battle against bed bugs. Unlike do-it-yourself or over-the-counter bed bug treatment products, Armor & Shield can eliminate your bed bug problem in just one day.
Is a goal of Five Nines good enough?
The Gold Standard in the computer server world is 99.999% uptime. When you can achieve the Five Nines, you have a good server provider. Let’s compute a real-world number to Five Nines: downtime of 0.864 seconds per day or 25.92 seconds per month.
That level of perfection is not good enough when eradicating bed bugs. Let’s take a closer look at the real-world ramifications of achieving less than a 100% kill with any bed bug treatment.
One breeding pair of bed bugs can become 7.7 million bugs in 4 months!
I don’t think there is any question for the need to do all that you can to kill bed bugs the minute you suspect them. A bed bug infestation is a health hazard which can affect your peace of mind when you try to sleep, drive away customers, ruin a hard-earned reputation, and make you uncomfortable in your own office, house, or apartment.
For this example’s sake, let’s assume the do-it-yourself bedbug treatment achieved the Five Nines and is 99.999% effective. You celebrate because you eradicated all the bed bugs in your space except for one male and one female.
In the first month after treatment, your one pair of bed bugs will find each other. The male will mate by traumatic insemination. He pierces the female’s abdomen with his aedeagus and injects his sperm through the wound into her abdominal cavity. Soon afterwards, the female begins laying somewhere around 5 eggs per day.
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Eggs require about ten days before they hatch. With an adequate supply of food (that means you!), a larva will take one blood meal per week, grow, molt, and will reach sexual maturity somewhere around five weeks after hatching. It’s probable you will not know you have this growing bed bug problem for several weeks to a month or more. That is the unfortunate illusion that the bed bugs come back. You just never killed all of them in your treatment.
Here are a few quick, back-of-the-envelope calculations:
- Somewhere around day 12 the first eggs begin to hatch.
- Two weeks after infestation, you have 14 bed bugs. Congratulations!
- At the end of the first month, your bed bug colony has grown to 80 insects.
- As the second month ends, your colony has about 3,600 hungry bed bugs.
- By the end of month three, you can have as many as 172,000 insects. They’ll want to eat about 2 pints of blood per week, if they each got a full blood meal.
- Month four winds down and an unchecked and well-fed infestation has reached a population of 7.7 million insects spread across the entire life cycle. That many insects can weigh as much as a pound!
- In a typical week, they’d consume more than 2 gallons (16 pints) of blood. To put this into perspective, the average volume of blood in an adult human male is about 12 pints. A 14-pound baby has about a pint of blood.
- At the end of month five, the first pair is reaching the end of their lives.
- At the end of the sixth month, the second generation of 80 bed bugs is reaching the end of their lives. As the infestation grows, the number of end-of-life bed bugs is insignificant compared to the quantity of hatching eggs.
- As long as there is a food source, bed bugs will continue to eat, mate, and prolifically multiply.
- Bed bugs can ingest seven times their own weight in blood, which would be the equivalent of an average-sized male drinking 120 gallons of liquid.
- I’ve watched a horde of hungry bed bugs drain all the blood from a baby mouse.
The numbers become scarily staggering. Conducting a bed bug treatment that achieves the Five Nines when there is 7.7 million bed bugs will leave 77 bed bugs to restart the cycle. Any treatment that cannot achieve a 100% kill is guaranteed to provide a reinfestation. GreenTech Heat has a better solution.
The Armor & Shield 100% Solution
Heat indiscriminately kills everything within the treatment area. When Armor & Shield conducts a heat treatment, the professional bed bug treatment is 100% lethal to all stages of insect life, 100% of the time. Temperature measurements provides an empirical ensurance that every bed bug in the treatment area was exposed to the proper time at a lethal temperature and achieved a 100% kill. No other bed bug treatment methodology can provide this level of surety... and definitely not in only one day!
No games or gimmicks. No spray, hope, and pray you got all the bed bugs. Armor & Shield has the best single-day heat treatment solution for killing bed bugs with heat. So how does Armor & Shield get you to a 100% kill in just one day?
- We have the best bed bug heat equipment.
- We have the best temperature measurement strategies.
- Killing bed bugs with heat is all we do.
The bed bug exterminator saves you money
When you need a bed bug treatment, Armor & Shield will save you time and money. I do not recommend internet solutions or over-the-counter pesticides to deal with a bed bug infestation. Do it right the first time. We have a safe technology with years of proof from millions of successful bed bug treatments: and Armor & Shield successfully uses heat every day to exterminate bed bugs. No other bed bug exterminator in the entire Oklahoma City Metro Area including the communities of Bethany, Bristow, Broken Arrow, Chandler, Edmond, Guthrie, McLoud, Norman, Oklahoma City, Shawnee, Tulsa, and Midwest City can match the results you will achieve when you call Armor & Shield at 405-698-6090— and we prove this every day.
Don’t take our word for it
Armor and Shield Pest Control is truly the best pest control company in Oklahoma. I used their services to free our mattresses from bed bugs.
Mia Jacton
5 Stars: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 19, 2019
Eggs require about ten days before they hatch. With an adequate supply of food (that means you!), a larva will take one blood meal per week, grow, molt, and will reach sexual maturity somewhere around five weeks after hatching. It’s probable you will not know you have this growing bed bug problem for several weeks to a month or more. That is the unfortunate illusion that the bed bugs come back. You just never killed all of them in your treatment.
