Bed bug guide · Wollongong & the Illawarra
Bed Bugs: What To Do First
Do not throw the mattress out and do not move to another room — moving spreads them. Contain the bedding, stop sleeping elsewhere in the house, and get the room inspected.
Last updated 28 August 2026 · Premier Pest Control, Wollongong
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There is no product that gets rid of bed bugs immediately
This is the most searched question about bed bugs and it deserves a straight answer: nothing you can buy will clear an established infestation the same day. Bed bugs hide in cracks, seams, bed frames, skirting boards and behind loose wallpaper, and eggs are not affected by most surface products — which is why treatment involves follow-up rather than a single application. Anything advertised as an instant cure is selling you the first half of the problem. What you can do immediately is stop it spreading, and that genuinely matters.
What to do tonight
The instinctive reactions — bin the mattress, move to the couch — are the two that make it worse.
- 1
Do not move to another room
This is the single most common way a one-room problem becomes a whole-house problem. Bed bugs follow the sleeper. If you move to the spare room or the lounge, they will follow you there and you will now have two infested rooms.
- 2
Do not throw the mattress out yet
Dragging an infested mattress through the house and down the stairs distributes bugs and eggs along the way, and a replacement mattress in an untreated room is simply a new home. Mattresses can usually be treated.
- 3
Bag the bedding, wash hot, dry hot
Strip the bed into a sealed bag, carry it to the machine bagged, and wash and tumble dry on the hottest setting the fabric allows. Sustained heat in a dryer is what kills them — a cold wash alone is not enough.
- 4
Do not spray a supermarket product first
Repellent aerosols scatter the population deeper into cracks and adjoining rooms, which makes a targeted treatment harder and less effective. Leave the room as it is.
- 5
Get it inspected
An inspection establishes how far it has spread — which is what decides the scope of treatment. A single room and a whole flat are different jobs.
How to be sure it is bed bugs
Bites alone are not proof: people react very differently and some show no reaction at all, so bite marks are the least reliable evidence. The physical signs are much better. Look along the mattress seams and piping, the bed frame joints, the underside of the slats and the skirting board nearest the bed head.
- Small dark spots like ink dots on the mattress seam or bed frame — digested blood
- Rusty or reddish smears on the sheets where a bug has been crushed
- Pale amber shed skins, roughly the shape of the insect, in seams and joints
- Live insects — flat, oval, reddish-brown and about the size of an apple seed
- A sweet, musty smell in a heavily infested room
Bed bugs are not a hygiene problem
This is worth saying plainly because embarrassment is the main reason people delay calling, and delay is what turns a contained problem into an expensive one. Bed bugs are hitchhikers — they arrive in luggage, on second-hand furniture, in a delivered mattress, or through a shared wall in a unit block. They have nothing to do with how clean a home is, and NSW Health does not classify them as a public health hazard: they are not known to spread disease. What they cause is itching, broken sleep and, through scratching, occasional secondary skin infection.
What treatment involves
Every job starts with a detailed inspection of the affected room, so the extent of the activity and the harbourage points are known before anything is treated. Treatment is then targeted at those areas directly — beds and bed frames, skirting boards, furniture, and the cracks and crevices the population actually shelters in — rather than fogging a room and hoping. Depending on how established the infestation is and what the building is like, follow-up inspection and further treatment can be needed, and you should be told that at the start rather than after the first visit.
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Frequently Asked Questions
The questions we actually get asked on this — answered plainly. Call 02 4217 0117 any time if yours isn't here.
Call 02 4217 0117What if I slept in a bed with bed bugs?
You are not in medical danger — bed bugs are not known to spread disease. The practical risk is carrying them elsewhere. Change and hot-wash what you were wearing, do not move to another room to sleep, and avoid taking bags or bedding from that room into other parts of the house.
Can bed bugs live on pillows?
They can shelter in a pillow, particularly in the seams, but pillows are not where a population lives. The harbourage is the mattress seams, the bed frame joints, the slats and the nearby skirting — which is why treating only the bedding does not resolve it.
Can bed bugs live in my clothes or come to work with me?
They do not live on people the way lice do, but they will travel in a bag or a folded garment left in an infested room. Keep clothing and bags out of the affected room, and hot-wash and hot-dry anything that has been in there.
Do I need to throw out my mattress?
Usually not, and moving it through the house before treatment can spread the problem. Ask before you dispose of anything — and if a mattress does have to go, it should be wrapped and sealed before it leaves the room.
How did I get bed bugs?
Almost always by transport rather than anything you did. Luggage after travel, second-hand or delivered furniture, and adjoining units in an apartment block are the common routes.
Sources
Every claim on this page can be checked against a public authority. These are the ones we used.
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