Bed bugs have been, and still are, a nightmare for human society for ages. It is very easy to find and get rid of bed bugs living on your carpet unless they have long fibers where they will find hideouts. If that’s the case, the biggest problem you will have to deal with is the large carpet surface area.
You should clear the rest of your furniture and possessions when getting bed bugs out of your carpet. However, if you don’t, you are risking as they might be back in no time. In this article, we discuss how to get rid of bed bugs in the carpet, while we also shared info on what bugs live in a carpet.
How To Get Rid of Bed Bugs in Carpet – The Ultimate Guide
We all know that bedbugs can live anywhere in your house, from your mattress to your carpets. Bed bug infestation is also common in furniture-like structures, including bedside tables, around each leg of the bed frame, dressers, recliners, and sofas where people tend to sleep. Killing bed bugs and bed bug eggs from your carpet is a very daunting task and so is the job of getting rid of the maggots there.
For starters, you can’t kill bed bugs using a carpet cleaner but you can starve them. First, you need to remove bed bugs from your beddings, clothing, cracks in the wall, and furniture. The last part to tackle is the carpet to avoid the risk of bed bugs re-infesting in your room.
Follow the guide below to get started with getting rid of bed bugs:
Clear the Floor and Room
You should clear everything out of the room before you start doing anything. Start by inspecting and spraying your furniture with something powerful like tea tree oil that can kill bed bugs on contact. Launder and dry your beddings, rugs, wardrobes, and anything that needs to.
You can bag anything remaining that you cannot launder or spray. However, airtight bagging does not mean the bed bugs won’t spread. You can also suffocate bed bugs by keeping them in an oxygen-depleted atmosphere.
Throw away anything that you are not fond of after cleaning and inspecting the room to avoid the risk of getting back inside and re-infesting everything. When you clean your room piecemeal, you will get disappointed as bed bugs breed fast. Female bed bugs lay up to 8 eggs in 7 days and up to 500 eggs in a lifetime, meaning if you take a long to clean your room, new ones are waiting for you.
What Home Remedy Kills Bed Bugs in Carpet?
Several home remedies can help you get rid of bed bugs. Some of them work while others might not. If you want to kill bed bugs completely, you will need a combination of other products and treatments. When using these remedies to eliminate bed bugs, remember that they can cause skin reactions and irritations, especially if used excessively.
Some of these methods include:
Steam
Steam is a perfect means of removing bed bugs from your carpets as they work by creating heat, which helps kill bed bugs. Temperatures at 122°F (50°C) kill bed bugs eggs, and a high temperature of 212°F (100°C) will immediately kill them.
Look at the areas where bed bugs crawl to hide. Apply steam carefully to avoid damaging some finishes of your bed frame, mattress, and sofa seams. Steaming does not provide a 100% bed bug removal guarantee from the carpet.
Vacuum
A vacuum cleaner is one of the accessible and best ways to get rid of bed bug infestations. As mentioned earlier, vacuuming is not enough to kill bed bugs but reduce their numbers. If you want to get rid of bed bug infestations, you need to use more than just a vacuum cleaner.
Inspect all the cracks and crevices in your vacuum cleaner where bed bugs can hide. Other areas for hideouts include seams, tufts, zippers, upholstered furniture, and trim of beds. You can also prevent the spread of bed bugs to other house areas by throwing away the vacuum bag outdoors.
Essential Oils
You can use several essential oil recipes that claim to repel bed bugs, but most of them have very low mortality rates. However, if you want to stop an infestation, you have to do much more than repel them using essential oils.
Paraffin oil and silicone oil have the highest likelihood of suffocating and easily getting rid of the bedbugs compared to other oil recipes. However, there is not enough research that supports these oils to be effective home remedies for removing bedbugs.
Alcohol
Using alcohol is not a natural home remedy for removing bed bugs from your carpet, mattress, furniture, or bed frames. It only takes 50% of the time to kill a bed bug when you spray rubbing alcohol on it.
When you look at the cryptic lifestyle of the bedbugs, they only congregate together in groups out of your sight. Most come out during the night, making it hard to get rid of all of them as you can only kill the ones you easily see crawling across your carpet or bed. Also, keep in mind rubbing alcohol could cause a fire hazard as it is flammable.
Diatomaceous Earth or Silica Dust
Diatomaceous Earth (DE) is a natural pesticide with skeletons of diatoms made of silica dust. The pesticide has sharp edges that can cut through the bed bug’s exoskeleton and cause abrasion when it comes into contact.
The abrasion effect of the Diatomaceous Earth will dehydrate the bed bug and eventually die. Make sure to spread the Silica dust around the room, box spring, mattress, furniture, cracks, and crevices. DE gets rid of bed bugs slowly, but it works effectively if you leave it undisturbed.
What Kills Bed Bugs Immediately?
You need to act fast if you see bed bugs crawling and creeping in carpet fibers and your bed at night. If you wait longer to treat a bed bug infestation, the more time-consuming and expensive it will be. Do not worry about throwing out your carpet or mattress as it cannot solve the problem.
We got you covered with several treatment options to help you remove and kill bed bugs completely. However, you should know that eradicating bed bugs is not that simple, quick, or economical and that you must put in some work to sanitize the carpets well.
DIY First Steps to Control
If you want to control bed bugs quickly, there are several remedial measures you need to use to control bed bug infestation as you wait for the treatment. Using a vacuum cleaner will only reduce the number of bed bugs. You can also avoid the spread of bed bug problems by not moving items from room to room as that will re-infest other house areas.
After you vacuum an infested area, you should scrub the infested area to dislodge bed bug eggs. Use a powerful vacuum cleaner to suck dead bed bugs and clean them after use. Seal all the clutter and trash in a garbage bag and take them out. Use a strong heat steamer to kill bed bugs in the bed seams, baseboards, cracks, and crevices. Launder and dry your linens and bedsheets for at least 1 hour.
Traditional Chemical Bed Bug Treatment
Using chemical bed bug treatments requires a little bit of patience when removing bed bugs. The insecticides will kill the bed bugs quickly if they contact them directly. However, most bed bugs contact insecticides indirectly as they only come out of hiding for meals only.
The majority of insecticides do not destroy bed bug eggs. But they can kill the nymphs from the eggs from your initial application. The application’s purpose is to eliminate the nymphs before they mature and reproduce. It might not be the fastest way, but it effectively kills bed bugs.
Will Shampooing Carpets Get Rid of Bed Bugs?
Shampooing your carpet is not an effective way to kill bed bugs as steam cleaning. A carpet shampoo cleans the carpet but not the surface below, which is the hideout for bed bugs. The kind of steamer you use to steam your clothes can relatively reach high temperatures that can kill bed bugs but not all. Meaning it can only kill bugs up to 3/4 inches in the gaps of cracks and crevices.
To achieve maximum results, use a high-quality steam cleaner like a PureClean Steam Cleaner. Most users have had a great experience while using this well-built product.
The temperature of the cleaned surface should be between 160 – 180 degrees Fahrenheit is quite preferable to kill bed bugs. However, you should set the steamer’s temperature slightly above at around 220 degrees Fahrenheit to provide the heat with the surface needs. You should take care while using a steamer as high temperatures could harm you.
Bed bugs stay close to the surface of the carpet, unlike flies that live deep inside your carpet fibers. They are flat at the top of their bodies, giving them the advantage to crawl and squeeze their tiny bodies through cracks and crevices where they can find hideouts.
Conclusion
You may think that killing bed bugs is easy, but it’s not. Many factors affect the effectiveness of any pest management plan. If you don’t follow the right steps, you won’t see any results, and the bed bugs may find their way back in. To ensure complete eradication of bed bugs and other pests, you must apply various methods.
