Mattress Encasements and Interceptor Cups in Grand Rapids: Used Correctly

Encasements: what the Michigan source says

MSU Extension’s after-treatment article has one line on the subject, and it is an instruction: “Encasements should be put on mattresses and box springs.” The reasoning follows from the same article’s list of reasons treatments fail, which includes “all sources of bed bugs were not treated” and “re-introduction of infested items.” A sealed mattress and box spring are two sources taken off the table: anything inside cannot get out to feed, and anything that arrives later is on a smooth, light surface where you can see it instead of inside the seams.

• Certified bed-bug-proof, with a zipper that closes completely. A dust-mite cover or a waterproof pad is not the same thing; the gap at the end of an ordinary zipper is a door.
• Box spring first if you buy only one. It has more joints, staples and voids than the mattress, and on an inspection it is where we find them most often after the seams.
• Put it on after the treatment, or before a used bed enters the house, not as a substitute for either. An encasement over an untreated infested mattress protects the mattress; it does nothing for the headboard.
• How long to leave it on: none of the Michigan sources we rely on gives a figure, so we borrow MSU’s rule for sealed items, “at least a year,” and we tell customers to leave it on for good. A torn encasement is replaced, not removed.
• Inspect the outside of it along the seams and the zipper every time you change the sheets. Spotting on a white encasement is the earliest warning you will get.

Interceptor cups: our practice

A shallow dish under each bed leg with a slick inner wall, so an insect climbing toward the bed falls into the outer moat and one leaving the bed falls into the inner well. The Michigan sources do not discuss them, so what follows is how we use them, not a quotation. They are the cheapest monitoring there is, and they give you the thing the state manual says a treatment must achieve and cannot see for itself: whether “all locations” were reached.

• Pull the bed a hand’s width from the wall and keep bedding, cords and dust ruffles off the floor, or the cups are bypassed by the headboard and the duvet.
• Check every few days for the first two weeks after treatment, the window in which MSU says a conventional program’s surviving eggs hatch and a follow-up “two weeks later” is usually required; then weekly.
• Empty cups through the re-check is the evidence a treatment held. A single insect in a cup after a heat job is a reason to call, not to panic; it tells us which side of the bed it came from and whether it was heading in or out.
• Photograph anything you find against a ruler or a coin and send it. It goes in the file with the probe log.

What both tools are not

A treatment. The state manual’s standard is that a method reach bed bugs “in all of their hiding places,” and an encasement reaches two of them while a cup reaches none; the headboard joints, the nightstand drawers, the outlet covers and the baseboard gap are untouched. MSU’s instruction stands: “Residents should not attempt to eradicate bed bugs on their own.” The manual’s sample treatment agreement has the landlord promising to “caulk or seal any cracks and crevices in the unit” and to “make any structural repairs necessary to eliminate bed bug hiding places,” which is the same idea applied to the building: fewer places to hide, more places you can see.

The set we leave behind

On every job we leave the bed encased and cups under the legs, and the re-check reads them. If you are in a rental, both are cheap enough to ask the landlord for and cheap enough to buy yourself if the answer is no; the cup record is also evidence, for either side, of when activity stopped. The first two weeks →