The resurgence of bed bugs has been widely reported and many property managers are affected by this infestation.
Unhappy tenants, the loss of income and the expenditure of Bed Bug Control are on the rise for Property Managers.
When researching the most effective way to combat bed bugs, it is evident that everyone seems to have a different approach. Some companies use dogs for inspections, some don’t, some companies use steam or cryonite, some don’t. This inconsistency leaves a property manager to make the right choice. But what is the right choice when it comes to curtailing the rise of infestation?
The most effective bed bug control programs always seem to have several things in common; the use of bed bug dogs to properly detect an infestation, the application of steam to ensure the killing of the bed bug’s egg stage, the proper application of chemicals in a variety of forms (fogging, dusting, and crack and crevice,) and perhaps the most important step is the preparations made by tenants prior to treatment.
The effective use of bed bug dogs.
There is no absolute method in the detection of Bed Bugs to date. The closest to an absolute can be found in the arrival of the bed bug inspection dog. At a proven detection accuracy rate of 98%, Bed Bug Dogs can inspect an average one bedroom apartment in about 2 minutes.
Human technicians are about 35% accurate and would take over an hour to do a thorough inspection of the same one bedroom unit. Bed Bug Dogs can sweep around 25 to 30 units in an hour, as opposed to the human inspector of one per hour.
Now imagine you have 100 units in an apartment complex, the bed bug dog can inspect the entire complex in about 4 hours. A proper human inspection would take about 100 hours. Bed bug dog inspections are about $300 per hour and the average human inspector is about $100 per hour. In this scenario of 100 units to be inspected, the average cost for a bed bug dog inspection would be $1,200 with a 98% accuracy rate, where as, a human inspector price would be $10,000 with only a 35% accuracy rate.
Bed Bug Dogs help save property managers money on the treatment process.
No longer does a property manager have to treat units adjacent, above and below a unit that has been found to have an infestation. That means for every one unit that has bed bugs, property managers were paying for 4 additional treatments and exposing more tenants to treatments needlessly. By using a bed bug dog for inspection, only units that have been found to have bed bugs actually has to be treated.
Bed Bug Dogs have been trained by the best trainers to be hard workers and friends to man. Nevertheless, a truly effective Bed Bug Dog must be trained daily, kept active and healthy, and be constantly aware of his/her objectives. Bed Bug Dogs are not pets, they are an invaluable part of a bed bug control strategy, and as such are treated with the love and respect they deserve. Amazingly, they seem unerringly eager to do their jobs, finding an obvious sense of gratification in what they do, all the while needing only the praise and love of the handlers to fuel them forward.