Can Bed Bugs Live In Your Car?

They can, and the car is usually not the real problem. A vehicle is a route rather than a home: bed bugs ride in on a bag, a coat or a piece of furniture, shelter in a seam for a while, and ride back out into a house. Finding one in a car is worth acting on, but the question that matters is where it got on.

That changes what you do about it. A car does not need a treatment plan the way a bedroom does. It needs an honest look, a dryer, and a decision about the house the car keeps driving back to.

How Do They Get Into A Car?

On something you carried in. Purdue Extension calls bed bugs excellent hitchhikers and says they travel on luggage, personal items and clothing, and that buying infested second-hand beds and other furniture has been shown to accelerate local outbreaks. Both of those paths run through a vehicle: the drive home from a hotel, and the drive home from a free couch at the end of a driveway in Canton.

None of that says anything about how clean the car is. Ohio State University Extension's bed bug fact sheet, HYG-2105, states plainly that infestations are not usually a reflection of poor hygiene or bad housekeeping. The same fact sheet notes that the EPA, the CDC and the USDA all treat bed bugs as a public health pest, and that there is no evidence they transmit disease to people. What you are looking for is small: HYG-2105 describes adults as reddish brown, oval and flattened, about a quarter of an inch long, with nymphs that look the same but smaller and lighter.

Where To Look Inside A Vehicle

Take a flashlight and work the places where something could wedge itself out of the light, close to where a person sits. HYG-2105 says the early signs on a bed are small rusty spots, which are droppings and blood spots, and that is the same evidence to look for in a car, along with shed skins and live bugs.

• Seat seams and stitching, and the gap where the seat back meets the base.
• Under the seats, and the carpet edge that runs along the door sill.
• A child safety seat: the fabric edges, the harness slots, and the seam where the cover meets the shell.
• The edges of the floor mats, and the trunk or cargo liner.
• Door pockets, the console and the glove box.
• Anything soft that lives in the car, including a blanket, a pillow, a gym bag or a seat cover.

If you find something, keep it. Tape it to an index card or seal it in a bag so somebody can confirm what it is, because the look-alikes matter more than most people expect. One bug in a car is usually a passenger off an item rather than a population living in the upholstery, so the useful next step is checking the bed at home and whatever the car has been hauling. Our walkthrough on how to check for bed bugs covers the bedroom side of that.

Does Leaving The Car Closed Up In The Sun Kill Them?

Rarely, and the research has gone against the idea. The EPA's do-it-yourself page does list black plastic bags in a hot, closed car in the sun as an option for luggage and small items, but it conditions the whole method: success depends on your climate and other factors, and the contents have to become hot enough. Two extension programs are blunter. Cornell's IPM program cites research from Australia demonstrating that solarization does not eliminate bed bugs from infested items, and University of Minnesota Extension says wrapping items in black plastic and putting them in the sun will not get hot enough to kill all the bugs.

The numbers show why it is so easy to miss. Heat has to reach the insect, not the air around the bag.

Those National Weather Service figures are summer figures, measured for a very different reason: they come from its warnings about children and pets left in parked cars. The agency also reports that a dark dashboard or seat can reach 180 to more than 200 degrees Fahrenheit, which is what drives the air temperature up. Mid October in Stark County does not supply that. The sun is lower, the afternoons are short, and the part of the load that stays coolest is the middle of a packed bag, which is exactly where bed bugs and eggs sit. Without a thermometer inside the bag, you are guessing.

What Does Work On The Things That Were In The Car

A clothes dryer, mostly. The EPA lists a dryer on high heat as a do-it-yourself method that works, and University of Minnesota Extension puts it at a medium to high setting for 30 minutes. Dry heat is enough on its own, so items that cannot be washed can still go through the dryer. Cornell adds the failure mode worth knowing: crowding too many items in blocks the hot air and the treatment fails, so run small loads.

• Bag what comes out of the car where it sits, carry it straight to the laundry, and empty the bag into the machine rather than onto the floor.
• Run the dryer on high for at least half an hour, in loads small enough for the air to move.
• Vacuum the seams, mats and trunk, then seal the vacuum bag or canister contents and put them in an outside bin.
• Leave a child safety seat to the manual that came with it, which sets out what may be used on the harness and cover.

What not to do is improvise with heat or chemicals. The EPA is direct about the house version of this: do not try to kill bed bugs by raising the temperature with a thermostat, a propane space heater or a fireplace, because it does not work and it is dangerous. A car is a smaller, more flammable version of the same bad idea. Retail sprays and foggers have their own record, which we covered in why bed bug sprays and bug bombs fail, and a product labeled for a lawn or a baseboard is not labeled for a vehicle interior where people breathe and children ride.

The Car Is The Easy Thing To Forget On Treatment Day

This is the part that costs people a second visit. A heat job brings the treated space up to a lethal temperature and holds it there; the car in the driveway is not that space. If bedding, clothes and boxes get staged in the trunk while the house is treated and then carried back inside afterwards, the house has been treated and the belongings have not.

So the car belongs in the conversation before anything is scheduled. Our office walks through a written preparation list with you, and what you plan to move out of the house, and where you plan to put it, is part of that list. The bed bug heat treatment page explains what the heat itself does, and how to prepare a home for heat covers the rest of the staging question. If the trip that started this was a hotel stay, the routine in what to do about bed bugs in a hotel picks up at the curb.

When It Is Worth Having Someone Look

When the evidence is in the house as well as the car, when it keeps turning up after a round of laundry, or when you are not sure what you found. Bed bug inspections are free, in North Canton, Canton, Akron, Hartville and the rest of Stark and Summit County, and an inspection settles the identification before anyone spends a weekend on the wrong insect. Book one through our bed bug treatment page or here, or call 330-494-6199, and say what the car has been carrying so the inspection starts in the right place.