WINNIPEG - A Winnipeg landlord who had bedbugs in his suites has designed and built his own solution for ridding the pests, he literally bakes them to death.Leon Wieler took an old equipment trailer, installed heaters and fans, and now heats the inside to a temperature that's fatal to bedbugs.
Wieler calls that temperature the "thermal death point."
"It was a matter of necessity. I had my first case of bedbugs about four years ago. I'm a very hands-on landlord. I do my own repairs, that's what I do. And the response I was getting from my exterminators wasn't adequate," explains Wieler, who owns a 36-suite building.
"So I did my research and I became an exterminator and I built my bedbug oven, because the research has found that heat is the Achilles heel of the bedbug."
Wieler says he learned extermination himself, but needed a way to treat furniture, mattresses, TVs and computers.
So Wieler tried putting various items of furnishings in the trailer and eventually discovered that bedbugs die when the temperature hits 50 C.
It sounds simple, but Wieler says it took nearly four months of experiments to get the cooker right. Too high a temperature in one spot can start a fire or melt something. Too low in another spot might mean some bedbugs survive.
He also had to figure out how long it would take the heat to penetrate various types of furniture.
Winnipeg landlord turns old trailer into cooker to rid furniture of bedbugs
