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Comment by chasil | Hacker News Reader

Even the best hotels have dealt with bedbugs. For safety, leave your luggage in your car for a few days when you return from a trip.

Ideally, you want the temperature to either drop below freezing or rise above 100°F, which will kill bedbugs.

The same procedure should be employed with used furniture, perhaps more aggressively.

There is also a trick with dry ice and talcum powder if you think an infestation is starting and you want to confirm.

If I had never bought rental property, I would never have known any of this. I am relieved to have sold it all.

EDIT: The article says 120°F.

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IIRC, below freezing also isn't generally good enough -- I forget what the specifics are from when I cared a lot about it 5+ years ago, but it's something like -20C consistently for a few whole days for all the stages of bedbug and their eggs to be destroyed by cold. They're surprisingly resistant to death from cold -- but a good hot dryer at 120F for ~30+ minutes will definitely get 'em.

This exactly. Freezing is useless unless you have something like a lab freezer that gets to -50C. Hot dryer for clothes, and you can put empty luggage in a dark trash bag and leave it in the sun to heat treat.

Having run the bedbug site, what's your advice on long-term travel? I've never gotten bedbugs, but I feel it's only a matter of time. How do you balance prevention with simply living your life?

Bedbugs are my valued business partners and I feel it's only right I should give back sometimes.

I do a quick bedbug check (headboard, nightstand, boxspring) in hotels I visit and mostly don't worry about it.

Have you ever found any by doing that?

Fromy my experience, they aren't great at stealth. I once had them in a hotel room, they came crawling towards me as soon as I laid down. I killed the first two and fled. Got a different room at the same place that was not infested (it was late and I was poor then). No bedbugs came home with me though I did put clothes in the freezer just in case.

It really depends on how severe the infestation is, and how long it has been since the bugs had a meal. Very hungry bedbugs will come out in the open, less hungry ones will wait until the middle of the night to feed.

I do wonder how very hungry bedbugs exist in a hotel room. But the evolutionary pressure against gratuitously running over an uncovered bedsheet while the light is on is pretty clear, too.

Yes, once. It was a heavily infested room in a hotel in West Virginia, I could see multiple juvenile bedbugs along a seam in the box spring.

Always use the luggage stand.

Hmm that makes sense. I don't have a washing machine so I was worried about getting these from the launderette. Especially since some of their customers seem to be of the no fixed abode type.

But I always wash my stuff at 60C and bedding and towels at 90C (for Fahrenheiters that's nearly boiling). And then dry for 30 minutes at 80C. I guess that does the job.

I'm surprised my clothes don't shrink from those temperatures. I wear pretty much only cotton but it seems unaffected.

> Especially since some of their customers seem to be of the no fixed abode type.

I would think homeless people would be less likely to get bedbugs, not more. They aren't lice -- they can't live on people.

I’ve always heard to put your luggage in the bathtub when showing up at a hotel, then check the bed for signs of bedbugs. If it’s all clear than you can move your luggage into the main room. If it’s not, request a new room or go to a different hotel.

Preventing getting them seems preferable to trying to avoid brining them home.

> leave your luggage in your car for a few days when you return from a trip.

how would that help? are you assuming the temperature in the car goes below freezing or above 120F?

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