How to Prepare for a Bed Bug Inspection

Search for how to prepare for a bed bug inspection and most of what comes back is preparation for a treatment. That means bagging clothing, stripping beds, pulling furniture away from walls and emptying closets. Those instructions exist because heat and chemical treatments need access to every surface and need soft goods out of the way.

A canine inspection works on scent, and scent behaves differently. Disturbing a room moves it around, and cleaning removes it. Preparation that helps a treatment can actively reduce what a dog is able to tell you.

Clear a walking path. The handler and dog need to move around beds, sofas and along walls without stepping over things. Floor clutter is the main thing that slows an inspection down and the main thing worth dealing with beforehand.

Put pets in a closed room or take them out. This is about the dog working rather than about safety. A resident cat behind a door is fine, a resident cat in the room is a distraction.

Turn off air purifiers, fans and portable air conditioners, and leave windows closed for an hour or so before the appointment if you can. Moving air disperses scent and makes a dog work harder for the same result.

Hold off on cleaning. No steam cleaning, no shampooing carpets, no spraying anything, and ideally no vacuuming in the twenty four hours before. Strong scented cleaners are the worst of these.

Write down where the problem seems to be. Which room, which side of the bed, when bites appeared, what has already been treated and when. The handler works the whole space regardless, but knowing the history changes how the report reads.

Do not strip the beds. Bedding is one of the highest value scent sources in a home. Stripped and laundered bedding takes that away and takes any visual evidence with it.

Do not move furniture, and do not move belongings between rooms. If you shift a suspect chair from the bedroom to the living room before the inspection, an alert in the living room now tells you something misleading about your home.

Do not apply an over the counter spray beforehand. Retail products rarely resolve an infestation and they contaminate the environment the dog is reading.

Do not throw the mattress out. This happens often and it is almost always premature. Until an inspection tells you where activity is, disposing of furniture usually means paying for a replacement that gets infested by whatever is still in the room.

Tell us the treatment date and what was done. For a verification sweep, timing changes what a clear result means. Two to three weeks after treatment is the useful window, because surviving eggs may not have hatched before that and a clear result too early does not carry much weight.

A typical residential unit takes under an hour. You can be present. Most people are, and there is usually a running conversation about what the dog is doing and why. Some people prefer to wait in another room, which is also fine.

You get the findings verbally before we leave, and a written report listing each location the dog alerted on. If nothing is found, the report says that, with the date and the areas covered, which is the document that matters if anyone questions it later.