News & Notes

Editor’s note: Suppliers and PMPs, if you have a bed bug-related news item or product you’d like to see highlighted in an upcoming issue, please send a press release and a high-resolution photo to jdorsch@gie.net.

5 Tips To Help Prepare Properties For Heat Treatments

For PMPs, being good at your game means showing customers how to be good at theirs. Providing bed bug treatment prep tips to your customers can make a difference for them and your company. Here is a quick checklist to get started:

1.) When approaching a bed bug heat treatment job, ask your customers to make sure the target areas are cleared. Eliminate things like cluttered clothes, blankets, toys or stuffed animal toys. These items can provide harborage for bed bugs, and limit the circulation and penetration of heated air. Remember, if the heat doesn’t penetrate, full eradication will be unlikely.

2.) Make sure anything that can melt or be damaged by heat is removed. Fish tanks may heat up and kill possibly expensive fish species. Our company, Bed Bug Heat Doctor/PrevSol, is familiar with a situation in which a customer had an expensive oil painting that “drooled” from the heat. That is a serious potential liability. The same thing is true with candles near expensive clothes. Decorative candles, which might be treasured mementos, will melt. Such high temperatures are uncommon in typical settings, and customers may not understand the complications that can arise. Also, prescription medicines may be at risk if not removed.

3.) Strip beds of all coverings and make sure furniture is placed for optimal heat exposure and where there is nothing to impede circulation. Also, remember to ask your customer to remove clutter inside closed drawers. If there is clutter, bed bugs will be sheltered and won’t get the exposure to heat that is needed for eradication.

4.) Find out the customer’s power capabilities, and make sure to check how the circuit breakers are labeled so you are tapping the right source. Let customers know that applying their own pesticides could drive bed bugs into deeper hiding where they’d be harder to reach and eradicate.

5.) Do your own “prep check” to ensure guidelines are implemented before you start. Encountering problems along the way can waste time, money and affect the project success level. Also, take advantage of the best practices offered by the NPMA and the National Apartment Association. Their wealth of information can be invaluable in assuring customers’ satisfaction.

Such basic measures will become second nature, but ultimately help you to be the PMP of choice when the needs arise.

P.E.S.T. Relief International Continues Its Mission Work

P.E.S.T. Relief International partnered with Ashley Furniture’s Hope to Dream Program to provide new mattresses for the children of Abba House, Cumming, Ga. This location hosts an 18-month addiction recovery program for women and allows for children to be reunited with their mothers after 12 months of counseling, therapy and healing. At that time, the children come to live with their mother until she graduates from the program.

Through the Hope to Dream program, P.E.S.T. Relief International placed 10 memory foam mattresses though out three homes on the property. In addition, 10 mattresses were reserved to launch a program for mothers who graduate from the program. Upon returning home, the child will receive a bed, mattress, pillow, sheets and comforter.

Glenda Lehmberg (Certified Pest Control Operators of Georgia) and Andrea Hancock (vice president, Mattress Safe, and founder, P.E.S.T. Relief International) spent time organizing the donations of the old mattresses and overseeing the installation of the new ones.

“These mattresses will definitely help us and our children rest more soundly and it definitely boosts our moral. It is great to feel valued — especially in recovery,” one resident said.

Visit www.pestreliefinternational.com to learn more.