Professional Bed Bug Control in Greenwich

Signs You May Need Bed Bug Treatment in Greenwich

• Bites that appear overnight. Often in a line or a small cluster, usually on skin that was uncovered in bed. Reactions vary enormously between people, and one person in a bed reacting while the other does not is common.
• Small dark spots on bedding or the mattress seam. Digested blood, which marks fabric and does not brush off.
• Live insects in the seams and folds. Adults are about the size of an apple pip, flat, and reddish-brown.
• Shed skins. Pale, empty casings in the seams, in the bed frame joints or behind the headboard.
• Activity beyond the bed. In an established infestation, the harbourage spreads to bedside furniture, skirting joints, sockets and the edge of the carpet.

Do Not Throw the Mattress Out

It is the first instinct and it is almost always the wrong move. A mattress on the landing does not remove an infestation that has already spread into the bed frame, the bedside table and the skirting - it removes the item that told you where the bugs were. It also risks moving them through the rest of the property on the way out, and it means sleeping somewhere else in the house, which is one of the most reliable ways to spread bed bugs into a second room.

Where They Came From

Bed bugs travel on luggage, on second-hand furniture, in the seams of a bag put down in the wrong place, and between flats in a converted building. They are not an indicator of an unclean home and never have been. The reason it is worth thinking about the source is practical rather than moral: if the answer is a recent hotel stay, one bedroom is the likely extent of it; if the answer is a neighbouring flat, the treatment plan is a different conversation.

How Bed Bug Treatment Works

The visit starts with an inspection to establish which rooms are genuinely affected, because that is what the price is based on and because treating a room that does not need it helps nobody. Harbourage is checked in the obvious places and the less obvious ones: mattress and base seams, bed frame joints and screw holes, headboard fixings, bedside furniture, curtain hems, skirting joints and the perimeter of the carpet.

Treatment is then applied to those harbourages rather than broadcast across the room. A follow-up is a normal part of a bed bug programme rather than a sign that something went wrong: eggs are considerably more resistant than the insects that laid them, and the second treatment is timed for what hatches after the first.

What we will ask you to do before the visit

1. Strip the bedding and wash it on the hottest wash the fabric allows, then tumble dry it. Bag it on the way to the machine rather than carrying it loose.
2. Clear the floor around the bed and remove items from under it, so the perimeter and the bed base can actually be reached.
3. Do not move mattresses, bedding or furniture into another room. Keep everything in the affected room.
4. Do not apply any retail insecticide in the days before the visit.
5. Keep sleeping in the same bed unless you have been told otherwise. It sounds counter-intuitive and it is genuinely important: moving rooms moves the problem.

Bed Bugs in Rented and Shared Properties

In a converted house or a block, bed bugs can move between flats through service voids and shared walls, and a treatment that stops at one front door can be undone from next door. Where there is any suggestion of that - a neighbour with the same problem, or activity that returns in a treated room with no travel and no second-hand furniture to explain it - we will say so, because the right answer at that point involves the freeholder or the managing agent rather than another treatment of the same flat.