Thermal death times · heat and cold
Heat works. Air temperature doesn't.
Bed bugs can't evolve resistance to heat the way they have to pyrethroids — it's a physical kill, not a biochemical one. That makes temperature the most reliable tool you have, and also the easiest one to get wrong.
The mistake that wastes the whole attemptLethal temperature has to be reached where the bug is, not in the room's air. A mattress surface can read 140°F while the padding two inches in sits at 85°F — comfortably survivable. Every method below lives or dies on whether heat penetrates to the core of the item, which is why a probe thermometer placed inside the item is the only real verification.
Thermal death time — what the published figures actually say
These numbers disagree with each other, and that disagreement is worth showing rather than averaging away. Two peer-reviewed studies anchor the range; extension-service guidance sits alongside them. Everyone agrees on the shape: a few degrees hotter collapses the time required.
The single consistent finding across all of it: the egg is the most heat-resistant stage. Any figure quoted for "bed bugs" that doesn't say whether it covers eggs is a figure that will leave you reinfested in a fortnight.
What to do with the thing in your hands
Different items take different methods, and several common items have no safe thermal option at all. Pick what you're holding.
Ways this goes badly wrong
Space heaters and the furnaceDomestic heating cannot hold a room at 120°F and was never designed to try. Attempts to force it are a documented cause of house fires, and unattended space heaters run for hours in a closed room are exactly the scenario fire services warn about. Cranking the thermostat also doesn't work — it heats air, not the core of a mattress.
Alcohol, petrol, and other flammablesRubbing alcohol is a recurring feature in bed bug house fires. It kills on direct contact and does nothing residually, so people apply it in volume across bedding and furniture — creating a vapour hazard next to pilot lights, heaters, and cigarettes. There is no version of this that is worth the risk.
Sealed pressurised items in heatAerosols, lighters, batteries, and anything under pressure do not belong in a heat chamber, a hot car, or a dryer. Neither do candles, vinyl records, or anything with adhesive that will let go at 120°F.
Treating the freezer as fastCold works, but slowly, and the failure mode is invisible. A domestic freezer that doesn't actually hold 0°F, or an item too bulky for its core to reach that temperature, produces a bag of survivors that looks identical to a bag of dead ones.
Sources, and why they disagree
This page cites conflicting figures on purpose. Reconciling them honestly is the reason to build the page at all.
- Kells & Goblirsch (2011) — University of Minnesota. 100% mortality across all life stages including eggs at a sustained 118°F for roughly 71 minutes; the egg was the most thermally resistant stage. The strongest single anchor because it covers eggs.
- Pereira et al. (2009) — 100% adult mortality at a sustained 113°F for about 95 minutes. Adults only, which is why it reads as more optimistic than it is.
- Virginia Cooperative Extension / VDACS — 113°F for 90+ minutes, or 20 minutes at 118°F, with eggs requiring 118°F for 90 minutes. Notes that whole-room treatments succeed at a nominal 113°F thermal death point because powerful fans create convection currents that heat the bugs far faster than still air would.
- Where the spread comes from — studies differ on life stages covered, on whether the reported temperature is air or substrate, and on airflow. Those three variables explain nearly all of the apparent contradiction. State which one a number refers to and the conflict mostly dissolves.
- Cold — the widely cited threshold is 0°F held for at least four days, measured at the item's core rather than the freezer's setting.
- To verify properly — the primary literature is in the Journal of Economic Entomology and university extension publications. Read the abstracts before quoting a number; the secondary pest-industry pages that dominate search results are where these figures get garbled.