Can Partnering with Property Managers Reduce Treatment Costs?

 

 

Can Partnering with Property Managers Reduce Treatment Costs? 

 

Bed Bug Central recently conducted a study that evaluated the use of Temprid™ and Demand® as liquid residual pesticides in a bed bug treatment protocol. The study also evaluated the efficiency and effectiveness of using property maintenance staff for manual labor during bed bug treatments. The study was intended to be performed on all levels of bed bug infestation; however the property that agreed to participate in the study was found to have widespread, low-level bed bug infestations. Therefore, all units in this study were low-level bed bug infestations (less then 20 bugs found on the initial service).  

 

In this study we achieved control using Temprid™ as our liquid residual treatment in an average of 3.23 services compared to an average of 3.00 services using Demand®.  We did find more bugs in the Temprid™ group (43 total bugs in 13 initial services) compared to the Demand® group (7 bugs in 11 initial services) but all were low level infestations.  We also found that we did not gain any efficiencies or effectiveness when a trained bed bug technician worked with property maintenance personnel (98.8 technician minutes on the initial service, 51.9 minutes on the first follow-up) compared to two trained technicians performing the job (196.7 technician minutes on the initial service, 91.8 minutes on the first follow-up).

 

The results of the liquid residual study suggests that when we compare using Temprid™ or Demand® for our liquid residual pesticide, we achieve control in the same amount of time. This study also suggests that our original theory that having two trained technicians perform a service will increase efficiencies and effectiveness may not be true since we achieved the same amount of effectiveness with only one technician and a person on site to help assist with manual labor.  

 

 

Research is currently being conducted to indentify the reasons behind these findings.