Safe, Electric Bed Bug Heaters Can Be Used for Many Things Beyond Just Remediating Bed Bugs With Heat
Question:
What do Henri Matisse’s great, great grandson, hot yoga studios, a national construction company, hospitals in Canada, a veterinary clinic in Nebraska and a sports bar in New Hampshire all have in common?
Answer:
They all use PestPro Thermal Electric Bed Bug Heaters.
Located in the spectacular Blue Ridge Mountain town of Asheville NC, East Fork Pottery is a Certified B Corporation founded in 2009 by Alex Matisse, the great, great grandson of famous modernist painter Henri Matisse who passed away in 1954.
Since launching this custom pottery studio Alex and his team are always looking for ways to improve their internal production processes to create superior ceramic pottery for their discriminating and loyal customers.
One of the things they decided to do was to experiment with using heat to speed up and improve the strength of their ceramics while they were drying. This is the step before the pottery is glazed and fired in a kiln.
After spending a lot of time trying to find an appropriate solution that would fulfill their requirements for portability, durability, heat output and price they found PestPro Thermal Systems.
The punchline of course is they ended up purchasing an electric bed bug heater originally designed and engineered for heat treatment for bed bugs from PestPro Thermal and immediately saw dramatic, improved results in curing their high-end, artistic ceramics products.
When I asked them why they chose a PestPro Thermal bed bug heater their response was simple: because your heater is the only one made of steel and since we would be using it around the clock it would need to last a long time and be self-serviceable if anything goes wrong. We refuse to pay for expensive roundtrip shipping charges to get products fixed that never should need to be fixed in the first place.
Thank you for that vote of confidence East Fork Pottery. We appreciate your business and love your products.
Why Do Hot Yoga Instructors Love PestPro Thermal Bed Bug Heaters?
Devised by yogi Bikram Choudhury, ‘Bikram Yoga’, also know more commonly as hot yoga, became popular in the early ‘70s and continues to grow in popularity across the globe.
Bikram’s goal was to re-create the ideal conditions of India's heat and humidity to practice his fixed sequence of 26 yoga postures indoors in America.
The indoor conditions he needed to achieve were 105º F and 40% humidity.
Since HVAC systems, boilers, PTACS or any heating system for that matter used to keep humans warm are not capable nor programmable to achieve such high indoor temperatures it became a challenge of how to get the yoga studios hot enough during classes.
The answer to hot yoga aficionados both in and outside of scheduled classes (which of course stopped during the pandemic) was in the form of a portable heater to kill bed bugs.
The beauty of such a simple device which was initially engineered to kill bed bugs with heat is that it is a portable bed bug heater. It can move from studio-to-home-to-studio-to- garage and anywhere you want to practice your 26 yoga postures in the re-created heat and humidity of India (where the practice of yoga is known to have originated over 5000 years ago during the Indus-Sarasvati civilization).
The PestPro Thermal bedbug heater for apartments only requires 2 power cords one of which plugs into a stove or dryer outlet to actually generate the heat. This is a tremendous advantage to plastic, budget priced heaters which often require 6-8 power cords each plugged into their own room (since all the receptacles in a room are connected to their own circuit breaker). This is obviously not going to work in a yoga studio or typical apartment setting.
A PestPro Thermal bed bug machine is also superior in another way. Since they are made of cold-rolled steel they will be able to withstand the constant heating up and cooling down cycles that yoga classes require. Many times, classes are given 2-4 times per day. In comparison, plastic bed bug heat treatment equipment has a much shorter useful life span because plastic expands and contracts every time you heat it up and cool it down. This effect is why we have potholes in our streets. The asphalt heats and cools (expands and contracts) and after a limited number of cycles you get potholes, or in this case worn out and useless bed bug heaters that are beyond repair.
Another reason our bedbug heaters are popular within the yoga community is their ability to be repaired by their owners. We have designed our best bed bug heater to be self-repairable. What this means is you can get whatever replacement parts you need from Amazon and then easily fix them yourself (with over the phone assistance from us as needed). Independent yoga instructors tend to be very independent and do not like to be reliant on anyone else to keep their businesses running smoothly.
In comparison, since the cheaper (in more ways than one), plastic bed bug heaters need to be shipped back for repair it is the customer that pays for the round-trip shipping. Our customers find that unacceptable which is one of the many reasons they decide to pay a little more up front for a superior, durable, portable, safe and lasting investment in their businesses.
An added bonus of course is if they or any of their students ever have an unfortunate bed bug infestation, they have the right tool for the job: a portable bed bug heater.
Namaste!
Why is a heater intended to kill bed bugs also the best solution for construction environments?
For most of the time a new building is being constructed it is not connected to any utilities like electric nor is the HVAC system activated. A tow-behind generator is always available to run lights and tools.
To keep highly skilled, highly paid workers warm, safe and productive the options are limited.
Beyond keeping people warm heat is also ideal to speed up the drying time of drywall, paint and stucco.
A good heating solution needs to be portable, almost indestructible, and easy and quick to repair.
If you choose a propane heater for bed bugs or any direct fired heater that requires liquid fuel or compressed natural gas you will be introducing high levels of humidity and carbon monoxide into the construction area. This is of course both a health and fire hazard and the primary reason these types of systems are used primarily outdoors and in tented environments where fresh air is abundant. There is the added downside of not being able to automatically control the temperature. Depending on a human handler to adjust a valve to control the temperature is very risky for both humans and structures under construction.
Safe, electric bed bug heaters on the other hand have the built-in convenience of an automatic thermostat which maintains the temperature nicely in addition to not expelling any gases or humidity at all.
Construction customers tell us that our portable bed bug heater is the best construction heater they have found anywhere even though it was not designed for that purpose.
Sports Bar in New Hampshire Uses a Heater to Kill Bed Bugs for Emergency Backup Heat
One of the earliest non-standard uses of our bed bug heat machine came from one of our first customers in Manchester NH back in 2012. This woman had purchased 4 of our 10,000 watt heaters to kill bed bugs and one of her customers was a sports bar owner.
The northeastern most states in the USA including New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine are notorious for having unstable power grids and lots of associated power outages.
Well, after one pretty severe Nor’easter took out the power for an extended period of time our customer was called upon to use her heat machine for bed bugs to keep the sports bar warm enough for customers to continue drinking. It was a fairly large bar and the owner told her that if he had to shut down it would have cost him thousands of dollars.
Cheers to the best bed bug heater available anywhere!
Professional Fire & Flood Remediation Customer Cut Their Teeth Using a PestPro Thermal Bed Bug Heater
This is a quote from Alberta Fire & Flood’s website:
“Over the past several years a new method of drying has developed. Although refrigerant and desiccant drying are probably the most known and practiced methods of drying, heat drying has become a new favourite. The use of convective heat has been shown to be the most effective drying process under many sets of drying circumstances.”
That would ordinarily be enough said but we are so proud to have them as a satisfied customer we wanted to take some time to explain why we were chosen over some other portable bed bug heater. That’s the best part. They did try a slew of other brands and none performed as well, stood up to the abuse as well or was as easily portable or self-repairable. They collected enough data over a long enough period of time they determined the total cost of ownership or TCO of using PestPro Thermal commercial bed bug heaters to kill bed bugs would be much lower than any other heater equipment on the market regardless if it was marketed as for bed bug remediation.
Combined with PestPro Thermal high volume/high temperature fans from Xpower the results are compelling, and jobs happen faster and profits improved.
It is always so refreshing to have customers who are willing to consider new ideas and listen to reason and then see them reap the rewards for taking a risk.
Another Day Another Viral Variant
Grey box on wall at end is a PestPro Thermal Systems 10kW Bed Bug Heater. There is a second heater at the other end of the container behind the camera.
As mentioned in a previous post one of our engineering consultant agency customer’s, RSR Project Management in Winnipeg Manitoba, has designed and is now selling a “portable PPE sterilization chamber” they sell to hospitals as Portable Decon Pods or D-Pods.
They are constructed out of recommissioned steel shipping containers that have been turned into giant convection hot box chambers using PestPro Thermal Systems Bed Bug Heaters.
Hospitals park these D-Pods in their parking lots and in between shifts “cook” their staff’s PPE gear at 158º F so it can be re-used a few times before being disposed of.
This not only saves the hospitals money but also decreases the stress of not knowing if you will have enough PPE given the unpredictable surges, variants and current shipping and supply chain shortcomings being experienced globally.
Each of the shipping containers uses two PestPro Thermal Bed Bug heaters to achieve the temperatures required for the science of heat sterilization to work.
Richard Park, Project Lead told me our heater was the only one he could find that was made of steel, used stainless-steel finned heater strips and not only achieved the required high temperature and was portable but also seemed well suited for round the clock operation.
We are glad and proud that our heater to kill bed bugs is being used to help health care workers who are helping others who unfortunately have acquired this deadly virus.
Thank you to all the brave medical professionals for helping us weather this awful storm.
Veterinary Dog Kennel in Nebraska Uses Bed Bug Heater to Kill Fleas and Ticks Without Chemical Pesticides
A forward-thinking Doctor of Veterinary Medicine who did not want to expose his pet patients to toxic chemical pesticides learned that heat is the most effective and best way to kill fleas and ticks.
He purchased our industrial electric bed bug heater and uses it to “cook” empty dog kennels containing fabric and foam dog beds.
These dog beds are the perfect breeding ground for both fleas and ticks and they were spending enormous amounts of money on toxic chemical pesticides to kill them. There was also concern that staff was constantly being exposed to these chemicals and that the long-term side effects were unknown in humans.
Rather than continue to run the risk of a team member or someone’s pet getting sick from chemical exposure the decision was made to give try heat as a solution.
It has been 7 years of almost daily use of the bedbug heater given they instigated a prevention protocol regardless of if fleas and ticks are visually observed. Results continue to be totally positive with no repairs needing to be made since the purchase date.
As Bob Barker (RIP) used to say at the conclusion of every episode of the Price Is Right game show. “This is Bob Barker reminding you to help control the pet population – have your pets spayed or neutered”
Sage words of advice that we agree with here at PestPro Thermal Systems.