Avoid Bringing Bed Bugs Back Home With You After Traveling
While traveling is fun and good for your health, sometimes you will encounter hazards that can hurt you while on the road and even follow you home. In particular, if you choose the wrong place to sleep, you may find yourself attacked by bedbugs. Even worse, you risk bringing them home with you. Here are a couple of tips for avoiding this issue when traveling.
Travel with the Right Luggage
Many people prefer to use the soft-sided luggage because it's cheaper and tends to have more places to store item. If you want to stop bed bugs from traveling home with you, however, you should use hard-sided luggage for a couple of reasons. The bugs like to hide in small crevices and pockets, which soft-suitcases have a lot of, so a hard case with less storage areas will provider fewer places to hide and be easier to check.
The second reason is hard-sided cases are easier to clean. To kill bed bugs and any eggs that may be hiding in your suitcase, you need to wash it with really hot water and/or treat it with chemicals. A soft-sided suitcase may be damaged by this treatment.
Additionally, when at the hotel, inspect your room for bedbugs before bringing your luggage in and place your case on a table or chair. Bed bugs tend to stay close to the bed where their victims are but will crawl across the floor to other areas of the room to find a hiding place if disturbed. Keeping your luggage off the floor reduces the risk these bugs will find their way to your clothing.
Wash and Dry Clothing
Before bringing your clothes into your home, wash and dry the items. Bed bugs are notoriously difficult to kill but they are susceptible to extreme temperatures. Washing your clothes in hot water and drying them at high temperatures will kill any bugs you missed.
If you're not able to wash your clothing and suitcases before bringing them into your house, place them into sealable plastic bags. This will contain the bugs and prevent them from infesting your home until you can thoroughly inspect and clean the items.
It can cost anywhere from $500 to $1,500 to treat a home for bedbugs, depending on the extent of the infestation. These simple tips can help you avoid that cost as well as the associated headaches that come from dealing with these bugs. For more information about bedbugs or help getting rid of them, contact a local pest control company, such as Paffy's Pest Control .