What Wash Temperature Is Needed to Kill Bedbugs?

Appearance

• Bedbugs are usually oval-shaped and a translucent tan to dark brown. They will crawl quickly away from you if you are chasing them or trying to kill them with a tissue or newspaper roll. Their shells are hard and flat, a convenient shield from being squished to death, and probably the reason why they can climb through your sheets and from under your pillows in the night to feed on you. They hate light so most of their activity will be noticed in dim or nighttime lighting.

Washing

• If found on an article of clothing or any washable material, they should immediately be thrown in the wash on either a cold or hot water cycle. The bugs will not survive in cold water (usually freezing temperatures will kill them), and they don't survive in very hot temperatures (97 degrees to 120 degrees Fahrenheit.) After this, a high temperature drying cycle is recommended to ensure they are killed off.

Heating

• Any amount of intense heat will kill the bugs. This can include blasting an area with a hairdryer or setting the heater on in a room for a couple of hours at a temperature around or above 90 degrees. The oldest known way is leaving the furniture or sheets out in the sun for a whole day, especially starting when the sun is hottest around 10 a.m. or noon. Another trick is to leave the infested objects in a car that is sitting out in the sun. If the outside temperature is about 85 degrees, the inside temperatures easily reaches 100 degrees.

Cooling

• The bedbugs will suffer more at near freezing temperatures as well. Though it is not certain they will specifically die at those temperatures, it will prevent their rapid reproduction rate, which usually ranges anywhere in the thousands per year. If an area with an infestation is left in an extremely low temperature, the bed bugs will not survive.