Imagine you’re the general manager of large hotel. It’s Sunday morning. Your guests are checking out with their luggage. As they exit one room at a time, your housekeeping staff performs a deep cleans, strips each bed, collects the towels, vacuums the carpet, and cleans the laundry.
What aren’t you seeing during this relentless check-in, check-out, and deep cleaning process? You’re overlooking the tiny insects arriving with your guests’ bags and on the bottom of their shoes.
Designated as a public health pest by the Center of the Disease Control (CDC) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), bed bugs cling to luggage, clothes, and shoes.
After they hitch a ride on your guests’ bags, bed bugs hide in furniture seams, particularly in mattresses and box springs. They also reside in the small cracks in wooden bedframes and headboards.
Once they’ve found a home, they’ll reproduce quickly and profusely. Your guests will get bitten, which can hurt your business’ reputation.
Bed bugs don’t discriminate. They spread throughout single-family homes, summer camps, military encampments, and hotels alike. To prevent bed bugs from wreaking havoc on your establishment’s guests, follow our four recommendations.
1. Clean Under Beds and Other Pieces of Furniture.
Bed bugs thrive in cluttered environments. While your guests may have unknowingly transported bed bugs in their suitcase, these biting insects will eventually leave that luggage and seek out hidden places to live.
The more stuff you stash under beds, the more places bed bugs have to hide near a food source–namely, your guests. Have your cleaning staff remove the clutter from under your establishment’s beds and furniture. Schedule regular vacuuming.
2. Use Light-Colored Furniture Encasements.
If you run a hotel, camp, or another large-volume lodging company, then consider investing in light-colored furniture encasements for your establishment’s chairs, couches, mattresses, and box springs. Light hues allow your staff to readily identify early signs of bed bugs and their eggs, and address the infestation before it spreads.
3. Treat Furniture with Portable Heat.
Your housekeeping staff can’t remove the upholstery and encasement on every piece of furniture at your establishment. They also can’t reach every nook and cranny, every seam and crack in the building. Therefore, it’s critical to purchase portable heat sources to kill bed bugs and their eggs.
Bed bugs die at 113 degrees Fahrenheit. Ask your staff to plug in the heat source, let it heat up, and press it against the hard-to-clean areas of your furniture, bedframes, and doorframes.
This heat should kill your bed bugs immediately. If it doesn’t work on the first treatment, repeat the process.
The hotter your heat source, the less time your staff will need to pressure the seams and cracks. If you live in a subtropical or tropical environment, you’ll need to use a stronger heat source. Most bed bugs in hot climates can withstand warmer temperatures.
4. Purchase Beds with Metal Frames.
Bed bugs love wooden bedframes. Wood is warm and breathable. As it ages, wood cracks, giving bed bugs the perfect home and breeding ground. Because of this, many commercial institutions are switching to beds with metal bedframes. Metal stays cold, and doesn’t offer bed bugs the cozy cracks to live and breed.
At ESS universal, we design, manufacture, and distribute heavy-duty bunk beds with metal bedframes. All of our products are resistant to bed bugs, making them an effective, preventative tool to infestation. To learn more about our heavy-duty bunk beds, request a quote today.
