What Should You Avoid Doing Before Treatment?

1. Spraying the Room Yourself

What it does: a shop aerosol reaches the surfaces you can aim at, which are precisely the surfaces bed bugs do not sit on. What it achieves is disturbance — and disturbance drives a population out of its harbourage and into the next available gap, which is further from the bed and sometimes in the next room.

The second effect: residue already on a surface can affect what is usable on it afterwards. If you have already sprayed, that is not a disaster and it is important to say so.

2. Emptying the Room

What it does: takes an infestation that was in one room and distributes it through the rooms you carried things into. It also removes the evidence of where activity was concentrated, which is what makes a treatment accurate rather than general.

Clear within the room — under the bed, off the walls, along the floor line — and keep everything you move inside it.

3. Deep Cleaning

What it does: scrubs away the spotting and the cast skins that would have told somebody how far this has gone and where the harbourages are. A room cleaned to a shine before an inspection is a room that has to be worked out from scratch.

Vacuuming the seams with a crevice tool is different, and is worth doing if your instructions ask for it. Washing surfaces down is not.

4. Moving To Another Room

What it does: creates a second job. Bed bugs locate a host by exhaled carbon dioxide and by warmth, so a host who relocates is a host they work towards — while whatever you carry goes with you that night.

It is the most understandable item on this list and the most expensive.

5. Throwing Furniture Out

What it does: sheds along the route out — the landing, the stairs, the hall — and removes an item that was very likely treatable, from a room that still needs treating. The new bed then arrives into an untreated room.

6. Bagging Things and Leaving Them In the Room

What it does: shelters whatever is inside the bag from the treatment. A sealed bag of clothing in a treated room is a protected pocket, and its contents come back out afterwards.

Bagging is a step on the way to a machine, not a destination.

Windsor: Say What You Have Already Done

Most households have done at least one of the six by the time they call, and it is not a problem — it is information.

• Sprayed something: says what has been disturbed and what is on the surfaces
• Moved things to another room: puts that room in scope
• Somebody slept elsewhere: puts that room in scope too
• Deep cleaned: means the evidence has to be rebuilt from what is left
• Threw something out: means the item cannot be examined, and the route it took out matters

None of it is an admission. All of it changes where an inspection looks, which is the whole point of saying it.