What to do after treating bedbugs in an apartment

After treating the apartment for bedbugs, very limited cleaning needs to be done in it, after which people will be able to stay in the room safely, but at the same time the bedbugs will be poisoned if any single individuals of them remain alive. To do this, you need to wash some surfaces, but in general, cleaning should be minimal so that as much of the product as possible remains in those places where bedbugs can run.

Dead bugs in the apartment after treatment

Let's figure out step by step what needs to be done in the apartment after treatment for bedbugs, when, how and what kind of cleaning needs to be done in it, and when there is no insecticide or bedbugs left in it.

When can I return to the apartment?

After baiting the bedbugs, you need to return to the apartment before nightfall . The specific minimum period during which the premises must remain closed and people should not be in it depends on the method of baiting bedbugs:

• If the treatment was carried out with a cold fog or a hand sprayer, then you can return 2-3 hours after completion of the work.
• After treatment using hot fog, you can return to your apartment after 5-6 hours, and ideally after 8 hours.

This is partly why, by the way, we try to schedule treatments using hot fog for the first half of the day, so that before the evening the owners of the apartment can return to it, carry out limited cleaning and sleep peacefully in it.

2-3 hours after a cold fog and 5-6 hours after a hot one is the period during which the entire insecticidal preparation settles on surfaces in the apartment and has time to dry. After this, the product does not remain in the air, and you can safely stay in the room without personal protective equipment.

Smell after bedbug baiting

The smell after baiting bedbugs or cockroaches is one of the most common problems, since these parasites have been fought in Russia constantly and for a long time, often using means that have remained virtually unchanged since the last century. They are the ones that emit the aromas that you think you can smell even a month after treatment. More modern products with fragrance or odorless usually still have some subtle aromas, but their main difference is that they disappear when aired in literally 1-2 hours and are felt, and do not hit the nose with a suffocating wave, as soon as you return to the apartment.

When buying a bottle of the product yourself, you can only be guided by the information indicated on the label and, unfortunately, reality does not always correspond to the manufacturers’ promises, so products often have to be selected experimentally.

Carefully!

Never smell or inhale the contents of the insecticide bottle.
This can lead to burns to the mucous membrane of the nose, mouth and larynx, poisoning and more serious consequences, especially if you already have problems with the respiratory or digestive system. When ordering disinfection or disinfestation from SES “Des Group”, different means can be used for the same type of treatment, from the most budget-friendly, but effective, with odor, to the latest, but more expensive, odorless formulations. You can discuss this issue with a service consultant and choose the option from the proposed ones that suits you most in terms of price and properties.

What should you do immediately upon returning?

First of all, after returning to the apartment, you need to:

• Ventilate all rooms with a cross-flow of air. Simply put, organize a draft so that all rooms are ventilated. You need to ventilate the room for at least half an hour, preferably an hour and a half.
• If clusters of dead or dying bedbugs are found somewhere, then collect them with a broom and flush them down the toilet.

After baiting bedbugs with certain preparations (mostly domestically produced), a characteristic chemical odor may remain in the room, which only weakens, but does not disappear after ventilation. There is no need to be afraid of it - the smell itself is not dangerous and cannot lead to poisoning; it is emitted by a dry preparation on walls, floors and furniture. From those domestic poisons that our specialists work with, this smell disappears in 2-3 days, including from soft furniture elements. This means that you should not try to get rid of this smell immediately, during the first airing.

Therefore, by the way, although imported drugs are a little more expensive (and their treatment is a little more expensive), they are also preferable, since after treatment with them there is no smell left at all and you can be quite comfortable in the apartment immediately after returning.

Hot fog treatment

At first - half an hour to an hour - during ventilation there should be only one person in the room wearing a respirator, or at least a cotton-gauze bandage. If there is no respirator, then you need to enter the room, open all the windows, remove the bags from the ventilation grilles (the disinfectant secures them here before etching), leave the front door open and leave. For the next half hour or hour, you can stay near the front door, but outside the room. After this, all people can enter the apartment and begin cleaning it. Children and pets can only be brought into the premises after cleaning.

How to clean an apartment after disinfestation?

The main task of the first cleaning of the apartment after poisoning by bedbugs is to remove the drug from those surfaces that are most often touched by people and pets, but leave it in the maximum number of places where insects can run. This ensures that even if some single bugs survive the baiting, they will die due to several contacts with dry poison in the following days.

According to the experience of our clients, the safest and most effective are:

1. Wipe the surfaces of tables and oilcloth on them with a damp cloth. It is better to wash tablecloths immediately.
2. Wipe the armrests of the chairs.
3. Wipe off the product from the door handles.
4. Remove all bedding from the beds and put it in the wash. This includes removing and washing pillowcases from pillows and duvet covers from blankets.
5. Remove curtains and curtains and wash them.
6. Wash all dishes and cutlery that were in open areas and could have been exposed to the product.
7. If small children or pets live in the house, it is advisable to wash the floors in the center of each room - where children and pets most often sit, lie, or play.

These surfaces should be washed with water to which a little soap has been added. It is advisable to wash them twice - the first time with soapy water, the second time with clean water to wash off the soap.

Medicine and dead bedbugs in a sofa drawer

This type of cleaning will take about half an hour or an hour, and after it you can carry out normal life activities in the apartment absolutely calmly.

All bedding removed from beds and sofas, as well as clothes and soft toys that have been exposed to the drug, must be washed in a washing machine.

It is important to understand that the drug itself, after drying, does not leave marks on surfaces and does not threaten anyone with poisoning. Therefore, there is no need to intensively clean the apartment - it is enough to simply minimize the amount of product in those places that people touch most often.

Basic steps after disinfestation

All exterminators of our service leave instructions to clients about what needs to be done after treating an apartment for bedbugs, how to clean the place and what needs to be done with things, furniture and food.

In general, after disinfestation in the apartment you need:

• Keep it completely closed for a strictly defined period, the duration of which depends on the processing method;
• Ventilate the apartment for at least an hour with a through air flow;
• Wipe with a soap-soda solution those surfaces that people and pets come into contact with most often;
• Rinse or wash clothes, wash dishes that have been left uncovered.

It is not recommended to carry out general wet cleaning immediately after treatment. In most cases, the optimal period for carrying it out is 5-6 days after disinfestation, when you can be absolutely sure that there are no bedbugs left in the room.

There is no need to wash the apartment immediately after treating and ventilating it, since in this case the effectiveness of the product will decrease and some of the bedbugs may survive.

After disinfection, conditioning the room for several hours and thorough ventilation, you can return to the apartment, you can sleep, eat, and conduct normal activities in it. You can also return children and all pets to it. The infusion and ventilation itself should be carried out taking into account some specifics. Let's take things in order here.

It is not advisable to clean the apartment for 5-6 days after treatment - this may reduce the effectiveness of treatment

Is it possible to spend the night in an apartment immediately after treatment?

It’s not possible, but it’s necessary! On the first night after treatment, it is extremely important to stay indoors and sleep on a sofa or bed in case some isolated bedbugs survive here. These parasites will look for a person in order to feed, and in their search they will run along surfaces on which the fresh, most active drug is located. If there are no people in the housing on the first night, such surviving bugs will limit themselves to short forays and return to their shelters. The next day, the drug will already begin to erode, “fizzle out,” and even while actively wandering around the apartment, the bugs will have less and less contact with it, and its effect on them will be less and less effective. Therefore, the first night is the most effective for their destruction, and at least one person needs to be in the apartment during it.

If after treatment the apartment is cleaned as indicated above, it is absolutely safe to spend the night in it. It is enough to make the bed with clean linens, and in the rooms in which people sleep, leave the windows, or at least the vents, open.

On a note

Our practice shows that on the first night, single bedbugs can remain in apartments after our sanitary treatments in 24-25% of cases. In half of them, these single individuals die on the first night, crawling out of their shelters and crawling along a layer of dried liquid. A live person indoors stimulates their activity, increases the distance they run, and increases the likelihood of their death.

Traces of bedbug activity in the filling of the sofa
If one of the residents in the apartment is panicky afraid of bedbug bites, then the legs of his bed should be wrapped at night with adhesive tape, which is hung to catch flies, and the bed itself should be moved away from the walls and other furniture so that bedbugs from -behind the baseboards, or from under the parquet, they could only climb onto the bed using the legs. Trying to do this, they will stick to the tape and die even faster than they would die from the action of a dry insecticide.

As a rule, SanMariDez disinfectors treat sofas and bedbugs with special care, and therefore no living insects are ever left on them. If bedbugs can survive somewhere, then these are places in the room where it is very difficult to blow out the drug - cracks under parquet, or under a wooden floor in a private house, sockets, gaps behind wardrobes. And if there are no bedbugs on the bed and it is reliably protected from bedbugs with adhesive tapes, then even in such rooms no one will bite a sleeping person.

Practical experience

In practice, we have had cases when, during treatment, a sofa or bed had to be thrown away, and the owners slept on mattresses directly on the floor for the first few nights after treatment. It has never happened that any of them were bitten by bedbugs, since all the parasites were destroyed by a disinfectant, but for complete protection from bites, the mattresses in this case can be surrounded with the same adhesive tape on the floor, and the bedbugs will stick to it.

When is it necessary to thoroughly clean the premises?

It is necessary to completely clean the room after baiting bedbugs after 5-6 days, if during this time neither live parasites nor their bites on people were found.

If there are live bugs in an apartment, or from time to time people discover bites on themselves, you need to find out what kind of parasites they are - survivors of persecution, or those that entered the room from neighbors. Depending on this, subsequent actions need to be taken. We talked about this in detail when we looked into how quickly bedbugs die after treatment...

If there are no bedbugs left in the apartment, then 5 days is enough to make sure of this. After this, you can do a complete wet cleaning:

• Vacuum all floors, baseboards and carpets (including those that were rolled up before disinfestation);
• Wash the floors in all rooms;
• Wash baseboards, window sills, lower surfaces of window sills;
• Wipe the back and side walls of furniture (including cabinets and bookshelves) with a damp cloth;
• Remove mattresses from beds, wipe the frame and frame with a damp cloth, and wipe the inside surfaces of linen drawers in sofas;
• Wipe the door frames with a damp cloth;
• Vacuum carpets hanging on the walls.

In general, this should be a full-fledged general cleaning, during which all surfaces sprayed during treatment will be washed.

After such cleaning, you can be sure that there are no bedbugs or insecticide in the apartment

There is no need to wash upholstered furniture with anything special after treatment. It is enough to vacuum it several times during regular cleaning. After this, there will be no dry insecticide left on its surface.

Main stages of cleaning a room

Returning to the apartment, you should ventilate it well again. Then you need to wash all bedding and clothes. In this case, the water temperature should not be lower than 90°C. For bedbugs, temperatures above 45°C are destructive, so at 90°C there will be no living insects left. You need to wash pillows and blankets, as well as soft toys, if there are any in the apartment.

The next step is a thorough wet cleaning of the room. It is necessary to wash all kitchen utensils well and treat the furniture with hot water and an antiseptic. Soda solution can be used as an antiseptic. You can use a soap solution. To prepare it, laundry soap is dissolved in warm water. Those surfaces that people come into contact with most often are washed - tabletops, bedside tables, tables, door handles and more. Dishes should be washed using special detergents and cleaning products.

Particular attention should be paid to hard-to-reach places: vacuum and wipe baseboards and corners. In addition, it is advisable to use a vacuum cleaner over upholstered furniture, and also over wallpaper, but only the upper part. Ceiling and floor skirting boards should be washed only after 3-6 weeks.

When cleaning a room after disinfection, it is not recommended to touch those places with which a person has practically no contact.

A small amount of insecticide should remain in the cracks and folds. In the future, this will serve as a good prevention against the appearance of bedbugs.

If there are paintings or other decorative elements on the walls, they are also washed with soapy water. If you have carpets in your apartment, it is important to know that you need to vacuum them both from the outside and from the inside. Polished furniture and mirrors should be cleaned especially carefully, as a white residue from the sprayed chemical remains on their surfaces.

If it so happens that they forgot to remove some products from the home before disinfection, then after treatment for bedbugs they must be thrown away.

It will take about 1 month to completely destroy the insects. The advantage of this procedure is that there is no need to re-treat the apartment for bedbugs.

Thus, when faced with the problem of bedbugs in an apartment, it is necessary to approach the issue of getting rid of them with all responsibility. Not only the stage of disinfection of the apartment is important, but also the stage of its subsequent cleaning. You need to find out how long it will take to kill insects. By following all the rules of the procedure, you can get rid of bedbugs forever.

What should you do with clothes and things in closets?

In our experience, there are almost never bedbugs in closets with clothes. Over 15 years of work, out of six exterminators, only one saw bedbugs in such cabinets, and that happened in catastrophically infested apartments. For this reason, wardrobes are treated with insecticide only from the outside, with the doors closed, and the drug does not get on the clothes themselves. Therefore, there is no need to do anything with it after sanitation.

If some items were hanging openly in the room and the product could get on them, then they will need to be washed and then safely worn further. When washing, all the insecticide is washed off from the clothes and when put on, the body will not come into contact with the product.

How to prepare an apartment for disinfestation?

The final result depends on the preparatory activities.
What actions need to be taken to prepare the apartment for disinfestation against bedbugs? The first step is to carefully inspect the apartment in which pest control will take place, from the point of view of where they are found in the largest quantities. Pests love hard-to-reach places, but we can rarely find them in closets, clothes, books, etc.

For reference! Information about the location where insects are most common should be provided to the pest control officer who will come to the apartment to carry out the procedure.

All types of food and personal hygiene products must be removed from the rooms where disinfestation is carried out:

1. Food;
2. Stern;
3. Drinks and water containers for cats and dogs, other pets;
4. Towels, hygiene products.

All items and products must be locked inside cabinets. Also, do not forget to place personal items and personal hygiene products, such as toothbrushes, razors, towels, toilet paper, etc., in protective bags and bags.

What should I do if there is a strong odor left after treatment?

As a rule, a strong chemical smell remains if bedbugs are poisoned with cheap drugs - this is a common problem for the most economical customers who want to remove bedbugs for 1000-1200 rubles. Any self-respecting exterminator, simply for his own peace of mind, uses products that either have no odor at all, or the odor, after use, disappears in 2-3 days. At least at SanMariDez, all specialists work only with such products, and therefore after our treatments there are no problems with odor - even if very odorous domestic products are used, the smell after treatment ceases to be felt on the third day.

Agran is one of the smelliest, most inexpensive and most frequently used bedbug baiting drugs in Moscow.

However, those unlucky enough to deal with bedbugs sometimes have to deal with the smell separately. This is a topic for a separate big conversation, since the complexity of such deodorization varies in different cases: sometimes the smell can be relatively easily eliminated with improvised means, but sometimes to eliminate it you have to throw away the sofa, or even deodorize the room separately.

By the way, such deodorization is one of the sanitary services that all serious private SES provide. We also carry out this type of odor removal, and of all orders for deodorization, approximately 12-13% are calls to an apartment, where the unlucky owners called the same unlucky disinfectors, they poisoned (and sometimes did not poison) the bedbugs, and for several weeks now the entire apartment, furniture, wallpaper and floors in it mercilessly stink of cheap Agran or Averfos. And it is impossible to remove this smell if you simply wash the apartment, carry out wet cleaning and even wash all the things: the smell is tightly absorbed into the wallpaper, into upholstered furniture, even into linoleum and carpets.

In our experience, after such stinking insecticides, the only way to get rid of the smell is through a deodorization procedure: the room is treated with a special dry mist made from a preparation that neutralizes insecticide molecules on any surfaces and materials. This deodorization is very reliable, but costs the same as a full bedbug treatment.

Alas, by the time they order disinfestation, most clients do not know about such smelly nuances, and in pursuit of savings of 500-600 rubles, they condemn themselves to deodorization for 2000-2500 rubles. Despite the fact that after deodorization, the apartment will need to be washed again as thoroughly as after disinfestation.

Therefore, if you want to exterminate bedbugs once, clean up two days later and live peacefully in a clean apartment without foreign odors, immediately contact a service that will exterminate bedbugs the first time, and will do it cleanly and professionally.

How to get rid of odor after disinfection if cleaning doesn’t help

Most disinfectants have a specific odor. It can be an additional, and for folk remedies, even the main way to repel pests. Sometimes it is masked with fragrances, and some formulations have no smell at all. The presence or absence of odor has little to do with the effectiveness of the drug, although the price of odorless or fragrance-free products is usually higher than that of strong-smelling products. But its presence in the apartment is already a symptom: the stronger the smell, the more chemicals remain in the room.

The smell is not only unpleasant in itself: it penetrates into textiles, finishing materials, and remains on clothes and hair for a long time. It causes irritability, insomnia, headaches, and spoils the taste of food. A few simple steps will help make it less intense:

• Regular long-term ventilation of the apartment;
• Thorough wet cleaning with wiping of walls, doors, windows, floors;
• Vacuuming upholstered furniture;
• Knocking out, shaking out, dry cleaning of carpets, rugs, textile floor coverings;
• Washing home textiles at temperatures from 80°C;
• Washing children's toys in a soap and soda solution;
• Steaming shoes, outerwear, curtains, bedspreads;
• Removal of treated porous materials in which particles of disinfectants are retained - cardboard, foam rubber, dish sponges are best replaced.

Regular cleaning after cockroach pest control will make the smell less noticeable over time. But if it still remains, there are two cardinal ways to resolve the issue: cosmetic repairs or ordering a professional deodorization service.

is able to remove the problem of unpleasant odor in one treatment. After receiving the application by phone, employees agree with the client on the scope, timing and price of cleaning. Specialists go to the site with special equipment - steam generators and equipment for dry fog.

The time it takes to completely get rid of odors depends on the size of the house or apartment, but is usually about two hours. Upon completion of the cleaning, the client checks the quality of the work, pays for the work and receives a document confirming its completion indicating the warranty period. If the effect turns out to be insufficient, the guarantee provides for a second free cleaning, but over many years of work we have never had such cases. You can sign a contract for one-time or ongoing service.

Professional cleaning after disinfection is the best way to maintain health, return your home to its original cleanliness and forever remove from your memory the memories of the times of forced proximity to pests. Order cleaning from and start a happy life from scratch!