CES 2014: A Bedbug Detector that Looks Interesting but has Detractors (Video)

This is a slightly puzzling product. To begin with, Christopher Goggin, shown as the inventor of the Electronic Dog Nose (as featured in Popular Science) may not be the actual inventor, at least according to some of the comments attached to that 2011 Popular Science article. Yet other comments on the same article claim that the unit Goggin supposedly ripped off is totally different from his, and doesn't work, while his does. A report (pdf) on bed-bugs.co.uk says the device "...clearly fails to perform to the manufacturers specification and procedures." Goggin's badge at CES showed his company affiliation as Datt Solutions Group, but Datt's website did not mention him as of Jan. 21, 2013, several weeks after CES 2014 closed. A New York Real Estate blog is skeptical, as are others. Goggin also claims to have a laser device that will kill the bedbugs you find. It sounds great. But a person who prefers the tried and true to new products that may or may not work might want to use old-fashioned, all-natural Diatomaceous earth, which kills not only bedbugs but other insect pests, and costs very little compared to most other methods. If that method doesn't work, then it may be time to try dogs, lasers, and other ways to find and kill bedbugs, which have been spotted everywhere from luxury hotels to housing projects, even in taxicabs and movie theaters.

Comments

WTF is this actually about?

[wcrowe]

My hovercraft is full of eels.

Interesting but not useful

[Antipater]

So he has a mechanical nose to detect them, and he has a point-and-shoot laser to kill them. Neither of those are a good idea.

First of all, the detector. This one's the better of the two ideas. If it can do all that a dog can do, then it's probably worth it for someone uber-paranoid or in a high-risk environment. But it's 3-4 times the price of a dog visit, so someone who just wants a quick check around the apartment is better off with the dog. And that's still with the big IF it can do it as well as a dog.

Oh, and his worries that a bug-dog will jump all over your furniture or eat poison are ludicrous. They're highly trained professionals, like their handlers. Not quite police-dog level, but close. A bug-dog that wrecks the place or eats poison will not be a bug-dog for long.

Next topic - the laser. First of all, his statement about industry-standard insecticides is wrong. Only some exterminators still use pesticides for bedbugs; the others use heat. If they do use pesticide, there are new ones out there that are extremely potent and will not likely need to be reapplied. But the go-to treatment now is heat, and they do it in a much more effective way than this dumb laser. Bedbugs want to survive just like any other living creature - they will run away from a targeted blast of heat, and they'll run someplace the laser can't reach them, like inside the walls (if they weren't there already, which they probably were). Effective heat treatments raise the entire interior temperature of your apartment/house above bug-lethal temperatures. There is no escape.

Don't buy from this guy. He knows a little about what he's talking about, but his solutions are the wrong solutions. If you think you have bedbugs, contact a professional pest control operator. They are extremely difficult to kill, and you will often only make the infestation worse if you try to DIY it.

Re:Interesting but not useful

[Antipater]

Oh, and I forgot to mention this quote:

. But most of the time bed bugs are the result of just poor housekeeping in one place.

Which is flat out false. Bedbugs have nothing to do with cleanliness or housekeeping. They eat blood, not trash. They are attracted to you, not your mess.