Bed Bug Heat Treatments for Student Accommodation

The Situation

Student accommodation combines every risk factor there is: a large number of people arriving at once from everywhere, a great deal of second-hand furniture, shared living space, and a building that empties and refills on a fixed annual cycle.

The annual cycle is also the opportunity. Almost no other kind of accommodation has a guaranteed period when it is empty and nobody's belongings are in it, and that is far and away the best time to treat a building properly.

Photographs on this page are for illustration purposes only.

Changeover

The One Genuinely Easy Window

Treating an empty room is faster, cheaper and more complete than treating an occupied one. Nothing has to be worked around, nobody has to be relocated, every drawer and wardrobe can be opened, and there is no risk of a student carrying the problem to a friend's room while the work happens.

So anything reported during the year that could not be fully resolved at the time should go on a list for the summer, and the summer should be booked rather than hoped for. Blocks and whole floors can be done in one operation in a way that is simply not possible in term time.

It is also the point at which mattresses that should be replaced can be replaced without anybody sleeping on a floor.

Photographs on this page are for illustration purposes only.

Second-hand furniture

The Route Almost Nobody Controls

Students furnish from marketplace listings, from the pavement, and from whatever the previous tenants left. A second-hand mattress or an upholstered headboard is the single highest-risk item there is, and a bed frame with joints and screw holes is not far behind.

For a managed building, a rule that soft furnishings are not brought in from outside is worth having and worth stating at the start of the year, because it is far easier to enforce in September than in February.

For a landlord of a student house, it is worth knowing what arrived over the summer if a problem shows up in the autumn. The answer is usually a sofa.

Photographs on this page are for illustration purposes only.

In term time

When It Cannot Wait

Plainly, a student with bed bugs in November cannot be told to wait until July, and there is a welfare dimension: bites, lost sleep and the embarrassment of telling anybody all land on somebody who is also supposed to be working.

In term time the approach is the same as any shared building — inspect the affected room and the ones around it, treat what is affected together, and deal with the communal areas. What changes is the logistics, and those are worth agreeing with the accommodation team rather than improvising on the day.

Tell students not to move rooms, not to move their mattress, and not to spray anything. Those three messages prevent most of the spread that happens between the report and the visit.

Short answers

Heat Treatment Questions

Accommodation and rental property

If You Manage Somewhere People Sleep

The problem is different when the bed is not yours. These set out what changes.