If you have ever had a bed bug scare, the chances are good that you reached for a home remedy before you reached for anything else. Perhaps it was a spray from the hardware store, or rubbing alcohol, or one of the essential-oil recipes that get passed around online. Diatomaceous earth has its devotees as well. We understand the appeal, and every one of these promises quick relief. The honest truth about them is a little different, though.
You are certainly not alone in trying the do-it-yourself route first, and there is no shame in it. The studies on the subject are discouraging all the same. Home remedies have very low success rates, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency puts the failures down to a few familiar causes. Sometimes the product gets applied poorly. More often than you might think, the pest was misidentified to begin with, so the wrong battle is being fought altogether. And some of the products were simply never going to do very much in the first place.
The part that worries us more, having seen where these attempts tend to end up, is what they do to the infestation itself. A bed bug that feels threatened will scatter, and a colony that had been concentrated around one bed ends up spread through the walls and into the next room. Once that has happened, the job is considerably harder than it would have been on day one. A University of Kentucky study cited by the EPA found that over 86% of people who tried to self-treat ended up calling in professional help within a few months anyway. They paid twice, in effect, and lived with the bugs the whole time in between.
It would be comforting to think that hiring any professional settles the matter. Even the professionals do not always get it right, though, particularly when they lean on chemical sprays alone. A 2025 Virginia Tech study found gene mutations in bed bugs that give them a strong resistance to the common insecticides, pyrethroids among them, and those mutations take a real bite out of what a traditional chemical treatment can accomplish.
Spray-only treatments fail as often as 69% of the time, and resistance is a large part of the reason why. A failed spray leaves you in much the same place as a failed home remedy. The survivors retreat deeper into hiding, and back there they have all the time they need to breed.
So what does work? In our experience, and in the published research, the answer is heat, applied to the whole home at once, with a targeted chemical application alongside it.
A study in the Journal of Economic Entomology confirmed that heat above 140°F kills bed bugs at every stage of the life cycle. That includes the eggs, which nearly everything else misses. Paired with a residual chemical treatment, the method reaches 100% eradication, and it manages this even where the infestation is a severe one.
Companies that work this way routinely report 95 to 100% success within one or two visits. Nothing scatters into the walls, and nothing turns up a month later to start the ordeal over.
To sum the whole thing up, then. Home remedies usually fail, and they often leave you worse off than when you started (EPA Guide on DIY Control). Professional spray-only programs are heading in the same direction as resistance spreads through the bed bug population (Virginia Tech Study on Resistance). What keeps holding up, in study after study, is heat combined with a chemical residual (Journal of Economic Entomology).
If you are serious about getting rid of bed bugs, our advice has not changed in years. Save your money on the sprays and go straight to the thing that works.
From West Palm Beach, Fort Myers, Naples, and Cape Coral in Florida to Rockville, Bethesda, and Silver Spring in Maryland, our licensed technicians deliver guaranteed, one-visit Heat Assault bed bug treatment.
