Should You Bag Clothes Before Bed Bug Treatment?

Bagging as Transport: Right

The point of a bag is that loose clothing carried through a house sheds along the route. A closed bag does not.

1. Have the bag open in the room before you start
2. Everything goes in there, not on the landing
3. Tie it — not folded over, tied
4. Carry it, do not drag it
5. Empty it directly into the drum
6. Bin the bag outside, or wash it

That is a bag doing its job. It exists for the thirty seconds between the bedroom and the machine.

Bagging as Storage: Wrong

A sealed bag of clothing sitting in a room being treated is a protected pocket. Whatever is inside it is sheltered from the treatment, and it comes back out afterwards into a room that has just been dealt with.

It is one of the more frustrating ways a good treatment fails, because the household did a great deal of work to produce exactly the wrong outcome.

Bagging as Quarantine: Not a Plan

The idea that sealed bags can be left long enough for anything inside them to die is worth addressing, because it is widely repeated.

Bed bugs survive months without feeding at room temperature and longer in a cool place. A bag in a loft or a garage is a cool place. The timescales involved are not weeks — and nobody actually leaves a bag of clothes untouched for the length of time it would take.

It also does nothing about the eggs already cemented into somewhere else in the room, which is where the population actually is.

What Bags To Use

• Heavy-duty bin bags are fine for transport — the job is thirty seconds
• Clear bags are better for anything being stored clean, because you can see what is in them without opening them
• Zip-seal storage bags for clean laundry that has to wait a while
• Not cardboard boxes for anything coming out of an affected room. Corrugated card is a harbourage in its own right
• Not fabric laundry bags, which are the thing you are trying to avoid

After the Wash

The clean laundry goes into fresh bags — not back into the ones it travelled in — and those bags stay in a different room until you are told the treated room is ready.

That instruction feels excessive and it is the one that decides whether all the washing was worth anything.

Wokingham: The Things That Cannot Be Washed

Shoes, handbags, some coats, dry-clean-only items, anything with electronics in it. These are the ones that get bagged and left, because there is no obvious alternative.

1. Check whether the item can take dryer heat even if it cannot be washed — many can, and a full hot dryer cycle alone is often the answer
2. For the rest, ask when you book rather than deciding yourself
3. Do not leave them sealed in the room in the meantime
4. Do not move them to another bedroom either