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Bunnings is a popular Australian hardware warehouse, known in the country as one of the go-to places to purchase DIY, gardening, and other home supplies. Most of us will have taken a trip to Bunnings at some point, whether to purchase some screws, tiles, or cleaning equipment – but is it a good place to grab an effective bed bug spray?
Getting rid of bed bugs isn’t the easiest process, and it also inspires a lot of internal debate. Many professional pest controllers advocate for full-scale extermination projects, while others believe that a bed bug killer spray is all you need. Bunnings stocks a variety of insect killers and sprays, but what about a bed bug-specific product?
Today we’re looking into the Hovex 350g Germgard Bed Bug and Flea Killer, a spray that claims to showcase “Proven performance on a bed bug and flea treatment, killing not only the bed bugs and fleas but also the germs they carry” with efficacy for up to 6 months after treatment. This sounds promising, but how accurate is it really?
With this blog, we’re going to break down whether this bed bug spray is a truly effective bed bug treatment or just a pipe dream in a can. We’ll focus on its efficacy, instructions, safety and more.
At Bunnings, this Hovex product is the only search result that comes up when you look for a “bed bug killer”, however, there are a number of different brands and products available when it comes to more traditional insect killers.
Other brands of insect killers at Bunnings include:
Within each of these brands, there are various sprays and treatments, focusing on household usage, gardening, and the specific pests they spray and treat.
While some of these products do claim to be effective in dealing with bed bugs in their small print, it’s only the Hovex spray in question that mentions the creepy critters in its title.
So, why would Hovex’s new spray for bed bugs be any more effective than a typical insect killer or treatment? Does this product actually live up to its claims? That depends on what you actually expect to achieve with it.
While it touts itself mostly as a bed bug and flea spray, it also claims to be effective against cockroaches, spiders, ants, carpet beetles and silverfish, making itself out to be an all-purpose insect treatment. It also encourages use in the bedroom, living room, skirting boards and cupboards, along with direct application onto insects, bed frames, carpets and rugs.
When it comes to treating bed bugs with this spray, the instructions are highly underdeveloped, as well as being flat-out useless. The writing on the can instructs you to simply “lightly spray around bed, bed frame, and other locations close to the sleeping area”, which shows a clear lack of basic knowledge about the nature of bed bugs themselves.
Simply giving the bed and the frame a spray isn’t nearly enough to deal with bed bugs, especially when considering the various places where the infamous creepy crawlers are known for hiding. After all, bed bugs can – and do – hide within gaps in the walls, under floorboards, under the carpet, in power points, inside ensemble bed bases, along with various other areas of the home and bedroom.
This method also makes no reference to taking the mattress off of the bed frame, investigating the carpet, or using the bed bug spray to tackle mattress infestations effectively. With such a lax approach, you’re unlikely to make any sort of meaningful progress in your extermination.
Although the text mentions direct spraying in a general sense, the instructions make no references to spraying bed bugs directly. While a strong poison such as this would certainly kill individual bed bugs on direct contact, it’s essentially impossible to eliminate an entire bed bug infestation in this way. The nature of bed bugs is as such that you couldn’t possibly find all of them and kill them at once – and as we know, it only takes a couple of bed bugs to start and maintain a new hive.
Hovex’s bed bug spray will be ineffective for the proper extermination of bed bugs because almost all bed bug sprays are. While poison is poison and will usually work with direct contact, it won’t work comprehensively as some other treatments will – even if it does claim to remain effective for up to six months after your initial spray.
With direct contact being the only way you can kill bed bug, there’s no way you can expect this spray to finish the job. Bed bugs are crafty and inventive. If they fear an area has become dangerous, they’ll simply find somewhere else to hide.
With “six months” of efficacy, you might expect that the spray will cause surfaces and hiding spots to become totally uninhabitable for bed bugs in longer stretches of time, and even kill the bugs that return. This sounds great, but it’s just not accurate. The wingless bugs aren’t going to wander collectively into the sprayed areas to meet their fate – the more likely effect is that the bed bug infestation will spread further around your home as the insects flee the sprayed areas.
As mentioned above, the spray claims to last for six months on surfaces, killing all of the germs that pests bring with them. Some other sprays only last around 24 hours at a time, so six months sounds more effective and long-lasting than competing brands. However, while this might change the layout of the bed bug population for longer, it also means your home will be exposed to harsh chemicals for longer, which are doing little to eliminate your problem.
To kill bed bugs permanently , there are far more effective methods of treatment, such as organic powders, physical bed leg barriers and steam – but these will only really work if you use all the effective treatments together.
It also cannot be ignored that Hovex’s bed bug spray may not be safe to use in your home. Its main active ingredient is permethrin, a synthetic form of pyrethroid insecticide designed to mimic the effects of pyrethrum, which could be dangerous to humans in the same way it might kill bed bugs.
It’s known that long-term low-dose exposure to permethrin can cause serious liver and kidney damage in rats, meaning that a spray that leaves it lingering around your home for six months at a time could be potentially dangerous. Additionally, studies on permethrin are inconclusive on the subject of carcinogenic effects, meaning that the compound could even contribute to a cancer diagnosis.
The warnings on the back of the packaging even advise that “deliberately sniffing or inhaling concentrated spray can be harmful or fatal”, and that it can also irritate the skin and eyes. They also state it can be highly dangerous if used around an open flame, being a highly flammable substance.
While the text on the spray can does offer some precautions, there are no references to wearing any sort of mask or face covering when spraying for bed bugs, which shows a lack of caution for the potential organ toxicity of using it.
Finding the best bed bug room treatment isn’t always simple, but it’s clear that this product being peddled by Bunnings isn’t the right direction to take. To truly get rid of bed bugs you need more than a one-product solution.
Anyone can put poison in a can and call it a bed bug treatment. You clearly can’t trust something based purely on its claims, which is why the rating of this product on the Bunnings website is also relevant. It’s only garnered 2.4 out of 5 possible stars, which should be more than enough to tell you that it’s not worth purchasing.
It might interest you to know that we formerly used to sell our own brand of natural bed bug treatments at Bunnings. However, they failed to take on our entire product range, meaning that customers were unable to effectively treat infestations.
Our system uses a mixture of powders, dusters, steamers, physical plastic barriers, mattress encasement covers and pillow covers to treat an infestation.
Due to Bunnings not stocking our full range, customers were left dissatisfied, and we eventually withdrew from our partnership with them.
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