When I was in college, I worked in a cafeteria. As part of that, I had to obtain a food handler’s permit to work with and around the food we served. Part of the training I completed while getting my food handler’s permit and some of the in-house training focused on maintaining safe temperatures with food. Effectively, you want to keep food below 38 degrees Fahrenheit or above 165 degrees Fahrenheit. Why? Organisms that can live on food and cause food poisoning do not thrive at these temperatures. Beyond that, almost nothing lives on or in food that has reached 165 degrees Fahrenheit.
So, why am I talking about food safety when writing a blog for a pest control company? Well, heat has traditionally been used as a method of pest control. This method is most commonly used to treat bed bugs but does have the potential to help with other pests as well. If you were to inquire about how we would treat a home with bed bugs, you would be told that we do not use heat for home bed bug treatments. We use a chemical-based approach that we have found at the scale of an entire home is more efficient and cost-effective for solving our customers’ problems. We have found that it is not easy to get every nook and cranny of a home to the appropriate temperature and hold it for the necessary amount of time.
However, it is essential to note that heat is effective in the right situation. We believe in it so much that we bought a trailer and threw a wrap on it that says “Heat Treatment Trailer.” We are currently working on getting the equipment up and running in the trailer, but it’s important to ask, what will we do with our trailer? We put items, including luggage, furniture, etc., in the trailer and heat them to the right temperature for the right amount of time to kill any bed bugs or other pests hanging around on or in the item. It is much easier to get an item smaller than an entire home, or even a room, to that temperature and hold it for long enough so that it is much more effective than a complete house heat treatment. So whether you’ve traveled recently and are worried about what you may have brought home, or you’ve bought a piece of furniture secondhand and are worried about what it might bring with it into your home, give us a call and have it treated in our “Heat Treat Trailer.”
