Bed Bugs Home Remedy

Disclaimer: This post contains no magic bed bugs home remedy that you can pay $5 for and which will kill any bed bug in your home within 24 hours.  Sorry.

What I will give you is a frank and honest assessment of a few different bed bugs home remedies and whether they work or not.  I like to put the humorous disclaimer at the top to make my most important point, however: getting rid of bed bugs is not easy, and no matter what treatment solution(s) you use, you’re going to need to work at it.  All I can tell you is that the effort is worth it in the end.  So…

What’s the absolute best bed bugs home remedy?

This is really what you came to my website for right?  The answer is that you need a combination of 2-3 home remedies to ensure that you’re able to get rid of all of the bed bugs in your home.  If I didn’t care, I could pick any one of the treatment methods below and tell you that it’s the best, but the fact of the matter is that no one solution will be 100% effective.  Anyone who tells you otherwise either doesn’t know what they’re talking about or else is trying to sell you their magical bed bug solution.

Here are the things that work:

1. Dry Steamer: You need a dry steamer.  I’m not saying that no one has ever treated a bed bug infestation without a dry steamer, but there really is no better tool to kill bed bugs and their eggs around your home.  In particular, you’ll need to use the dry steamer on your bed, your furniture, your carpet, and anything else that is upholstered.  Doing so will make sure that no eggs survive the treatment and then hatch weeks later.  Be careful when you’re using this instrument, as it gets very hot (hence why it can kill bed bugs and their eggs).  Also, you’ll see that the typical price tag on a dry steamer is about $300 (they can actually be much more expensive, but a $300 one is just fine – check out the Vapamore).  This may seem like a lot to spend, but it’s a lot less than you’ll end up spending on extermination, so look at it as an investment.
2. Diatomaceous Earth:  Most people have never heard of this stuff, but it’s both cheap and effective.  It has a variety of uses outside of killing bed bugs, but kill bed bugs it will.  The best part is that diatomaceous earth does not need to be applied directly to bed bugs like most bed bug sprays.  Rather, this is a dirt-like substance – which is why it’s called "earth" – and it will stay around for bed bugs to walk across.  When they do, the bed bugs will die.  The most important reason that you need this is because no matter how thorough you are with the dry steamer, you’ll never get ALL of the bed bugs, so you need something that will keep killing bed bugs in the weeks and months to come.
3. Laundry and Vacuuming:  These are obviously not items that you will need to buy, but the point is, while you’re going through bed bug treatment, you’ll need to continually do laundry and vacuum every day.  Neither of these actions serve as treatment methods on their own, since they’ll only kill a few bed bugs here and there, but they’re important actions in terms of keeping bed bugs from spreading and recurring.

Here are the things that DON’T work:

1. Bed Bug Spray:  Listen – bed bug sprays actually DO work, in that they will kill some bed bugs.  I don’t want to make you think that all sprays simply don’t kill bed bugs, since they do.  The reason I don’t recommend bed bug sprays is because people tend to be very over-reliant on them, and also because the items mentioned above (a dry steamer and diatomaceous earth) work better than bed bug sprays.  If you want to use a bed bug spray in conjunction with the above tactics, then by all means, do so.  Just don’t think that a bed bug spray alone is going to be enough.
2. Any rudimentary heat or cold treatment:  You’ll read a lot of people argue that you can freeze items, place them in the sun, or else heat or cool things in such a way as to kill bed bugs.  There’s obviously some truth to this, since that’s the way that both dry steamers and laundry work to kill bed bugs.  However, these tactics are extremely limited, they only allow you to treat a few items at a time, and they don’t even guarantee that all the bed bugs in the particular item will be killed.  Ignore this sort of advice and go for things that have been proven to work.

As I noted above, there’s no bed bugs home remedy that will guaranty 100% success, and you’re really going to need to put a lot of effort into it if you have a major bed bug infestation.  I wholly recommend getting started as early as possible, since the longer you wait, the harder it is to get rid of all of the bed bugs.