Battling a growing pest problem: 'When you bake a bedbug, it's pretty dead'

“We’re essentially going to turn any space we enter into a very large convection oven,” said Frank Morales. “They really don’t stand a chance once we hit 135 degrees.”

If the thought of tiny bugs feeding on your blood while you sleep skeeves you out, those are comforting words coming from Morales, operations manager for Eco-Rid, a local bedbug extermination company.

Bedbugs were once associated with sketchy motels, but in recent years they’ve spread and are now a common problem in apartment buildings and homes.

“Five years ago, we got almost no bedbug complaints,” said Ken Lewis, administrator for the Colorado Springs Code Enforcement unit. “We get some hotel/motel (infestations), but not many. Mostly, it’s apartments.

“The real problem is they’re just so much harder to get rid of,” Lewis said. “They’re hard to find and hard to exterminate.”

That’s how John Obringer got into the bedbug business. Obringer manages several hundred local apartments, and eliminating bedbugs was a common headache for him. He researched the options and discovered an approach that uses heat to fry the little pests. He bought a $60,000 trailer equipped with a 40-kilowatt diesel generator and industrial-size heaters and fans, and set up Eco-Rid in August. It’s the only such system in southern Colorado, Obringer said.

“We can kill bedbugs by the tens of thousands, just using heat,” Obringer said. “When you bake a bedbug, it’s pretty dead.”

Thermal remediation, as the technique is called, doesn’t come cheap: $1 a square foot, or more than a thousand dollars for a typical home. Obringer argues that it can often be cheaper than other extermination methods since mattresses and furniture don’t need to be thrown away and it can kill all of the bugs’ life stages in one swoop, instead of requiring repeated treatments. The adults die at 113 degrees and, by the time the temperature hits 120 degrees, everything’s dead. Going to 135 degrees just insures all parts of the house hit the correct temperatures.

“I realize it’s not cheap, but it is effective,” he said.

The heat, Obringer said, is about what the interior of a car will reach on a sunny day. That means most of a homeowners’ possessions will be safe, but aerosol cans, crayons, candles, plants and, of course, pets need to be removed, along with some oil paintings that could be damaged. A typical treatment takes 6 to 8 hours.

To treat large homes, Eco-Rid’s crew hangs plastic barriers and does the dwelling in sections. The heat does the work, but Morales and his crew have to repeatedly enter the furnace to stir bedding and clothes and turn on fans to circulate the air.

“I’m looking forward to this job during the winter,” said Nick Artist, an Eco-Rid technician.
In some ways, bedbugs aren’t the worst pests in the world: They carry no diseases and many people have no reaction to their bites. But they’re gross, and not everyone is lucky enough to be immune to their company. When someone has a severe reaction to the bedbug bites, “it looks like the worst case of measles or chicken pox you’ve seen,” Morales said.

“Babies get it the worst, unfortunately.”

Bedbugs have become a nationwide problem. The National Pest Management Association said its members have seen a 71 percent increase in infestations since 2001. The association advises travelers to pull back hotel bed sheets and inspect the mattress seams for brown or reddish spots and to vacuum suitcases and bags before bringing them into your home, then store them in a plastic bag.

Bringing your work home with you might seem to be a risky proposition for an exterminator, but Morales said he doesn’t sweat it.

“We don’t worry about taking anything home,” Morales said, “because that’s what we’re here to do: Kill them.”
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Call the writer at 636-0275

BATTLING BEDBUGS
For more information on bedbugs, go to pestworld.org. To contact Eco-Rid call 481-4099 or go to ecoridllc.com