Will laundry detergent + cold water wash kill bed bugs …

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What Cilecto said.

I will only add the following:

Most prep sheets for PCOs require a hot water wash and a long time in a dryer because by doing both you're dramatically increasing the chances that you'll kill more of the bugs and their eggs.

Heat is the enemy of bed bugs. It is one of the fastest ways to kill them.

Many bugs and eggs will be killed by drowning in cold water with detergent. (Detergent does something to the surface tension of water that makes it more likely bugs will drown. I'm an English major, so please do not ask me to explain the science at work there. I just know that when I was battling ants, if I put plain water on the plate that I sat my cat's food bowl on, the ants would toss the dead bodies of their compatriots into the water and use the corpses as a bridge to the food.

But if I put dish soap around the edge, they couldn't do that.)

However, not all of them will be. Using hot water increases the chances of killing them.

Unfortunately for you, it's the time in the dryer that really is most efficient at killing them. So much so that most people say that if items are already clean, you can put those items into the dryer and run it long enough to get every nook and cranny of the item to be hot and then let the dryer run for 20 minutes past that point and that should kill the bugs and the eggs.

In other words, the washing even in hot water is far less effective than time in the dryer when it comes to killing bugs and their eggs.

(The bugs often glue the eggs in place, so just vacuuming won't solve the egg problem.)

While putting items on a line to dry--indoors or out--is very environmentally friendly, it's a useless method when it comes to killing bed bugs.

Even in warm temperatures, unfortunately.

(BTW to everyone else, no, I'm not dead. I also didn't decide that I didn't want to talk about bed bugs any longer. It's just midterms, so things are very hectic at work, and I haven't had as much time to be around on the boards. Now that California is climbing out of its fiscal crisis--however slowly we're climbing--my employment levels have gone back up, so time has been doubly short. Last year, for example, I was only teaching 75% of full time in the spring. I'm back up to full time. In the fall. my hours at the local community college dropped to 60% of what they normally are. In short, I'm back to a week that means the contracts say that I'm working 50 hours a week. Since those contracts seem to underestimate how long prep and grading actually take, I'm often working more hours a week than that. I will continue to pop in when I can, but there may be longer delays between posts and replies. Sorry about that. I just have a ton of grading to do. Trust me, I would much rather be posting here than grading--as my colleague said just yesterday, she would actually rather be getting a root canal, which she's actually had recently, than be grading-- but until I get more grading done, I have to dole out time here as a reward.)

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