Here is a reprint of an article I read today. It is upsetting to go into a home and find someone has wasted precious money on a product with false claims. Maybe this will help someone out.
http://www.pestcontrolcanada.com/
All-natural bedbug sprays have little effect
Products such as Rest Easy and Bed Bug Bully claim to be highly effective at controlling the insects, but researchers say there aren’t yet any consumer products proven to keep bedbugs away.
As worry about bedbugs grows, it’s no surprise that many people are taking pest control into their own hands. Do-it-yourselfers can choose from many different sprays that claim to kill the bugs and prevent infestations. Some products, like Rest Easy Bed Bug Spray, are sold as all-natural alternatives to traditional pesticides. Rest Easy, manufactured by the RMB Group, contains essential oils from cinnamon and lemon grass, among other ingredients. Bed Bug Bully, produced by a company called My Cleaning Products, claims to be 100% natural. The company website doesn’t list any ingredients, but a sales manager claims that the spray ingredients include tea tree oil and lavender.
A 16-ounce spray bottle of Rest Easy — sold at many Walgreens, Ace Hardware and other stores — costs about $16. The company website instructs users to spray Rest Easy on “dressers drawers, closets, along baseboards, behind headboards, and around any other furniture you want treated.” The site advises against spraying the bed directly. “If bed bugs are present in the bed,” the site says, “call a professional for extermination.”
A 32-ounce bottle of Bed Bug Bully, available at many drugstores, retails for about $50. A video tutorial on the company website encourages users to spray “wherever you think bedbugs may be.”
The claims:
The Rest Easy website says that its “optimized blend of natural ingredients has been universally recognized for thousands of years as a means for controlling insects.” In a phone interview, company President Howard Brenner said, “We are all-natural and highly effective.” He also said that people who have a serious and obvious infestation should call an exterminator. “Our product is for people who think they might have bedbugs or are paranoid that they might get them.”
The Bed Bug Bully site says the product is “by far the best bed bug treatment you can get on the market today.” It also promises “the same results delivered by pest service without evacuation.”
The bottom line:
Gail Getty, a research entomologist at UC Berkeley, says she’d love to see a day when people could quickly solve their bedbug problems on their own. “I want to encourage new research. It would be great if there was something that was safe and effective.” Unfortunately, she says, no consumer products on the market today have been proved to completely remove bedbugs from the home. Because bedbugs are so adept at hiding, and because any bugs you can target with a spray are going to just be the tip of the infestation, it really takes a professional exterminator to get rid of the bugs, she says.
Jones, the Ohio State University entomologist, is especially leery of “all-natural” products. “If you think that using these sprays is going to get rid of your bedbugs, you are sorely mistaken.” Jones points out that pesticide-free products such as Bed Bug Bully or Rest Easy aren’t required by the Environmental Protection Agency to prove that they are actually effective against bugs — all that matters is that they are considered safe. Jones adds that even professional exterminators armed with industrial-strength chemicals generally need several hours to clean out an infestation. “If somebody goes in and out in 15 minutes, you just wasted your money.”