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Comment by richbell | Hacker News Reader

Dealing with bed bugs and other pests has made me apprehensive about purchasing used furniture. It's a shame because you can usually find great deals on FB Marketplace, Craigslist, Kijiji etc.

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Solution to this is to leave it in a quarantine room for up to 5 months (if you have the space).

Though and I say this anecdotally, when I moved back to the States I ended up refurnishing most of my house using street finds. We're talking like 10 different furniture finds include a futon frame (we bought a new mattress). Only 1 of those was upolsteres but was in great condition.

No bed bugs, I got lucky.

Where is it a cost-saving solution to pay for a quarantine room that will be unused for other purposes for up to 5 months, all so you can save a few hundred dollars by buying used furniture?

It's not unless you've got the space, I have a shed I put stuff in and let anything on it starve to death. You have to plan on for it

Bed bugs can go for ages without feeding; the only real way to kill them en masse is extreme heat—e.g. the dryer. There are services that come and seal your house up and then essentially pump 125F heat into it, to kill the bedbugs (bugs @ 120F, eggs @ 125F). If suppose if your shed gets to ~125F in the summer, should be good. Point being: heat > time-since-last-meal for bedbugs. (unfortunately I am speaking from experience)

Edit/addendum: The bed-bug-sniffing-dog, while a very good boy, is a total scam.

Thank you for saying it. Bed bugs can go literally three years without eating. Using the mixed-toxin (different bedbug poison for each treatment, minimum 2 treatments) approach usually works, but the only way to definitely kill existing bugs and eggs is to get every part of an object to over 125f. AFAIK, 125f is the instant-death point. That is, any bug or egg the hits 125f at all is dead. Otoh, 113f requires 90 minutes of exposure before the bugs are killed, and the eggs require 118f for 90 minutes.

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