You think you have bed bugs. Do these five things first.

Bed bugs are the one pest where the first hour genuinely changes the outcome. Not because you can eliminate them yourself (you cannot), but because the standard panic response spreads them.

1. Do not move bedding to another room

This is the mistake that turns one bedroom into three. Stripping the bed and carrying the linen through the flat to the washing machine deposits bugs and eggs along the route.

Bag the bedding in the room, seal the bag, and carry the sealed bag out. Wash at 60°C or tumble dry hot for thirty minutes. Heat kills every life stage; detergent does not.

2. Do not sleep somewhere else

It feels obvious and it is exactly wrong. Bed bugs feed on carbon dioxide and body heat. If you move to the sofa, they follow you to the sofa, and now you have an infested sofa as well as an infested bed.

Stay where you are until it is treated. It is two or three uncomfortable nights against weeks of extra work.

3. Do not spray a shop-bought aerosol

Over-the-counter pyrethroid sprays are repellent. They do not kill the population hiding inside the bed frame and the skirting; they drive it deeper into voids and outwards into adjoining rooms. In an apartment block that means into your neighbour's wall.

Every technician has walked into a job that was a single-room problem three weeks earlier and is now a whole-flat problem because of a €9 can.

4. Confirm what you actually have

Bed bug bites are commonly confused with flea bites, mosquito reactions and simple heat rash. Bites alone are not evidence: people in the same bed react completely differently, and about one person in five shows no reaction at all.

Look for the physical evidence instead:

Photograph anything you find. A clear photo sent through WhatsApp is usually enough for a technician to confirm the species before anyone visits.

5. Contain, then call

• Pull the bed away from the wall
• Remove the bed skirt so nothing bridges to the floor
• Bag anything soft that has to leave the room
• Do not throw the mattress out: a discarded mattress in a stairwell infests the building, and you will usually be able to keep it

Then call. Treatment is a survey followed by heat or steam plus a residual applied to harbourages, normally two or three visits ten to fourteen days apart, with a re-inspection before anyone signs it off.

For hotels and letting agents: treat the room either side and the room above and below as suspect until they have been inspected. Bed bugs travel through service voids and shared skirting far more often than guests expect.