DO BED BUGS LIVE IN CARPETS
Bed bugs are annoying little blood-suckers that can quickly get out of control in your home if you don’t take action.
It’s bad enough that you have them in your home crawling around the place but, they also bite. Once they feed, they swell in size and if they are adult females, they will start laying eggs. Have I gotten your attention yet?
I know what your thinking, that bedbugs only infest your mattress and bedroom, so you can just stay in the other rooms of your house if you have an infestation? Well, unfortunately, that isn’t the case and bed bugs can certainly live in your carpet or everywhere in your house.
The thing about bed bugs, of course, is that you might want to be proactive when it comes to dealing with these bugs.
Bed Bug Authority will give you the important information so that you know what to do if you find bed bugs in your home.
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Identify Bed Bugs
Bed bugs are little creatures that are about the same size as an apple seed. They’re quick when crawling around and can often be seen on the floor, walls, and furniture of your house. They won’t fly because they don’t have wings but they certainly can climb.
Once a bed bug has fed, it will swell up and turn a red color rather than dark brown. Their easy to spot after eating because they can barely move to getaway. Females can easily lay 1-5 eggs a day and therefore it’s also important to know how to detect baby bed bugs as well, but that can be a difficult task. Young bed bugs are harder to see than adults. They shed their skin five times before reaching maturity, so if you find any bug skin around your house, you might have cause for concern.
One way of determining whether you have a bed bug infestation is looking for bites on your body. That’s not always a sure sign because not everybody is allergic to their bites. If you never have an allergic reaction to their bites then you can go for weeks or worse, months without knowing you have a bed bug problem. By that time the infestation could be too out of control and it could be too late to eradicate them yourselves.
Another sign you can look for is that bed bugs tend to leave bloodstains where they’ve fed that can be imprinted on your sheets or clothing. Casing are left behind when bed bugs shed their skin from one stage to the other until they reach adulthood.
Live bugs will be clustered at bedding and mattress seams, edges, and piping. They can also be hidden inside the box spring. If your infestation is big, you can shine a flashlight into spaces like the gap between carpet and baseboards to see live bugs.
Do Bed Bugs Infest Carpet?
If bed bugs have infested your carpet, chances are that they’ve been living in your mattress for a while.
Mattresses are thick and perfect hiding areas for bed bugs to live and lay eggs, but once they’ve been there for a while, it might start to become a little crowded for their liking.
The original bed bugs might choose to relocate. If you’ve found bed bugs living in the carpet, we recommend you to check your mattress as soon as possible.
Getting Rid of Bed Bugs In Carpet
Luckily, there are a few different methods of getting rid of bed bugs in the carpet. However, before you settle on a method of eradication, you should follow some steps to ensure that you don’t get any more bugs infesting your home.
Prep
You’ll need to prepare the house before treating the carpet. Bed bugs often come from the mattress and spread onto the carpet. This means that you’ll need to remove them from the mattress, bed frame, and box springs. We recommend using a Mattress Encasement for controlling bed bugs from escaping to other parts of your home.
Mattress Safe encasements also eliminate the need to apply any chemical treatments to a mattress and Bed bugs are not able to escape or penetrate through the protectors or the laminated fabric to be bitten through.
Next, you should see whether they have infested any more of your furniture, bedding, walls, and clothing. If you find bed bugs on any of these things, you’ll need to spray them with a bed bug killer and make sure that all of the bugs die.
Once you think all of the bugs are dead, make sure that you wash the bedding and clothing, and wipe down the furniture with disinfectant. This will ensure that any eggs or immature bed bugs are removed.
Cleaning Up
Now that you have cleaned all of the infested furniture, you need to remove everything from the carpet. Do this slowly and carefully to ensure that bed bugs don’t move to a different hiding place, as you’re removing.
This is a big job, but it is also necessary so that all your efforts are not wasted. Keep all of your furniture outside of the infected room until you’re sure that all the bed bugs are dead. There are also furniture encasements available to help with bed bug eradication.
We would continue to spray all of the furniture over the next couple of days to really make sure that the bugs are gone and aren’t going to move to the rest of your house.
Kill Bed Bugs Living In The Carpet
Silica Gel
We all have those little packets of silica gel lying around from countless purchases, but you are going to need many more packets if you’re going to eradicate all of the bed bugs.
Or better yet get some Diatomaceous earth, for the most part, called diatomite is made of silica-based skeletons of microorganisms called diatoms. The compound course of action of DE is around 90% silica, 4% alumina, and 2% squeeze oxide. DE is a powder so be very careful when using it. Remember always to read the product label before using any chemical.
Sprinkle the silica powder around beds, mattress bases, sides of beds, in the seams of couches and around couches and on the legs of couches, and anywhere else bedbugs are likely to physically walk. It is always a good idea to use a Bed Bug Killer Spray in conjunction with the powder. Dust will take a few days to kill the bed bugs. Silica gel is a desiccant., and causes them to dry out.
Sprinkle this all over the carpet so that the bed bugs become dehydrated quickly and die. If you have a lot of carpet then you will need a good amount of Silica Dust.
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Steaming
Bed bugs don’t get along too well with the heat so a good way of killing them is to buy a steamer and get to work on your carpet.
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Steam treatments are effectively used to quickly eliminate live bugs and their eggs from the seams of mattresses and other cloth items. Effective use of this technique requires practice and
care.
Manufacturer’s instructions about the steam-generating devices’ operation, maintenance, and safety precautions must be followed carefully. Steam treatment can effectively kill all
stages of bedbugs.
If bedbugs have a weakness, it’s elevated temperature. Temperatures of about 120°F are lethal to most insects provided they cannot escape to a cooler location. Check out this video to see the heat in action killing bed bugs. Steamers work by delivering lethal temperatures to where bedbugs may be hiding.
Dry steam is quite effective when bedbugs are on the surface of items and up to ¾ inch into fabric surfaces. In cracks and crevices, dry steam will kill bedbugs up to 2½ inches into a gap.
The advantage of steam is that heating is intense and immediate. The vapor that is too hot to touch is what’s needed to kill bed bugs and eggs on contact. To be effective, steamers must be capable of delivering a minimum of 150°-180°F for a sustained period.
When targeting bed bugs though, the less moisture emitted the better, especially when treating mattresses and other slow-drying materials where mold growth is a possibility. Therefore, low-moisture, commercial-grade steamers are preferred.
Steam can be used to treat almost any area where bed bugs are found or suspected. Logical places include beds, couches and recliners, baseboards and carpet edges, beneath and within nightstands and dressers and floor areas, especially under and around beds.
Avoid treating finished wood surfaces or delicate items that might be damaged by high heat.
Not only will this kill all of the bed bugs almost instantly, but as a bonus, you’ll also have a clean carpet.
What Now?
Once you’ve managed to kill all of the bed bugs that can be seen, vacuum your carpet. Vacuuming can be effective at removing bed bugs from your carpets. You likely won’t get rid of all the eggs or bugs but, it will help cut down on the number of these creatures that are living in your home and reproducing. That’s where the silica dust does its job together with the spray.
When vacuuming for bed bugs, you need to use the strongest suction possible because bed bugs can hide deep in your carpets and furniture. To target edges more effectively, use the crevice attachment to focus on seams, cracks, and crevices where bed bugs commonly stay hidden from view.
Studies have shown that bed bugs can live over a year without feeding, so you need to make sure that they’re dead when you vacuum them up. Once you’ve done this, empty the vacuum into a plastic bag and leave it out in the hot sun for a few days just to make sure they are really dead. Make sure that you continue to vacuum frequently to avoid re-infestation.
Final Thought
Make sure to check all of your furniture for signs of bed bugs before you remove the furniture, and check again once you’re ready to put it back in the room.
Don’t forget that the mattress is more than likely the origin of the problem, so ensure that it is completely free of bed bugs before sleeping on it again.
