(R) Mini Duster

I left this feedback for all the items I purchased and listed here in prevention of BED BUGS. I live in a apartment building. 10 years ago in the city I live in I never heard any mention of bedbugs. Now I hear it everywhere. I purchased the following just as a precaution. Hospitology Sleep Defense System Waterproof/Dust Mite Proof Pillow Encasement, Standard, Set of 2 Hospitology Sleep Defense System Waterproof/Bed Bug Proof Mattress Encasement,80-Inch by 60-Inch, Queen Hospitology Sleep Defense System Bed Bug Proof Box Spring Encasement, 80-Inch by 60-Inch, Queen BEAP 10013 4-Pack Detector Bed Bug Coaster Trap Diatomaceous Earth Food Grade Pest Pistol Mineral Oil I read online many, many, many different suggesting and opinions. These are most popular ideas, and I agree with them. My bed is brand new and I wanted some protection. Every thing listed I purchased on Amazon is good quality and no complaints. I was very nervous the Hospitality Sleep Defense items would have a plastic feel, but it is not the case. The Hospitality Sleep Defense for the pillows and bed have a nice soft and smooth feel to them. They make my bed and pillows feel smoother and softer. They are a good quality and feel like they will last a long time and not rip. They are very big for even the biggest of mattresses or box springs. First of all the Diatomaceous Earth Food Grade box i received is big. I used this for my entire apartment and still have more then half left in the box. Using Diatomaceous Earth Food Grade, and Pest Pistol (online comments are you can also use empty plastic ketchup and mustard bottles) I dusted all long the walls under the carpet (use a dollar store paintbrush to keep it nice and neat), and in some places I lifted the carpet up and sprayed a little on the carpet tacs that hold the carpet in place. You do not have to spray it heavy, only a light coating. Then I took the electrical cover panels and sprayed inside the walls, USE CAUTION, TURN OFF THE ELECTRICAL PANEL SUPPLY. You might want to consider wearing a dollar store face mask, the Diatomaceous Earth Food Grade will blow around a little, if you get carried away with it. Make sure you spray into all holes and crevasses (even in the bathroom) behind the medicine cabinet if there are gaps, in the trimming along the walls, closets, everywhere!!! Every room, every space!!!!!!!. Online reports and comments are that bed bug like hiding behind the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, behind mirrors or photos hanging on walls, dressers, dressers drawers, light shades. I even sprayed a little on my bed frame. Keep in mind, if the Diatomaceous Earth Food Grade gets wet, it is useless and you will have to reapply it. Also note, if you shampoo your rugs a couple times a year, like me, you may have to reapply Diatomaceous Earth Food Grade after your rugs dry. Diatomaceous Earth Food Grade kills all kinds of bugs, cutting into their hard shell bodies and sticks into their joints. This definitely gives me peace of mind when I sleep or laying in my bed during the day. Bed bugs usually feed in the middle of the night, but if they get hungry they will come out all times of the day. Isolate your bed from the walls and the floors. Only have the legs of your bed touching the floor. Keep blankets from touching the walls and floor. Nothing should be touching your walls or floor. ISOLATION! Computer power cords and cell phone cords should not be on your bed when you sleep. Although there are online reports of bedbugs climbing up to the ceiling and falling down/jumping onto beds, I am not that paranoid. Because it is a death sentence for them, they cannot escape or live in the mattress or lay eggs in the mattress because of the Hospitality Sleep Defense. Always make sure you wash and dry your blankets and sheets every week. Dry for at least 20-30 minutes on hot. BEAP 10013 4-Pack Detector Bed Bug Coaster Trap are very strong and very big. I was very surprised! I was nervous, I have a QUEEN size bed with wheels under each leg. But they fit with room to spare. Use the Mineral Oil in the outer trench of the Coasters. Bed Bugs cannot swim in it, they sink to the bottom and drowns them. But dummy me, my queen bed frame has 5 legs, one leg to support the middle of the bed. I used them on my sofa also. Good luck if you find yourself with bedbugs or using these as a prevention and defense. If you do not have the time or energy, you can hire an exterminator which will cost thousands and thousands of dollars. I am the type of person I do not like to use pesticides in my apartment unless I have to. I never use those insect fumigators, they spray pesticides everywhere and you will eventually absorb them into your skin, from the floors and furniture. If you already have bed bugs, I suggest vacuuming every inch of your bed, on your bed, box, and frame head board. Then do your furniture, sofa and recliners. Sofas, couches and recliners are much harder to eradicate bedbugs from, you might want to think about trashing it. Please, before you trash your furniture, damage your furniture so no one else takes it and gets a bedbug nightmare. When you are finished vacuuming, remove the bag, put in a plastic trash bag and TAPE IT SHUT and put outside away from your house in a trash can. They start spraying the Diatomaceous Earth Food Grade everywhere. Bed Bugs are smart creatures, they are very good at hiding until they are hungry. And they will search you out like a blood hound dog. Good luck!

I recently discovered the many benefits of diatomaceous earth. I know. Where have I been? I purchased my first Pest Pistol along with a quantity of DE from Earthworks Health and have never looked back. Now I've bought a second unit from Amazon. (The first one's working fine. I just wanted one for upstairs, too.) There's nothing really fancy or complicated about these little (really only mini compared to the professional sized one which holds a half-pound of DE, etc.) puffers. It's a well-made, well-designed plastic accordian unit fitted with a screw-on cap which has a plastic "straw" applicator narrowing to an attached nozzle with a tiny hole in the end. The underside of the cap has a small built in "sifter" to keep a large quantity of powder from clogging the applicator as you "puff." The pest pistol can be used cap facing up or down or angled, depending on your target. I personally found it very useful to practice my skills in the garage before dusting the carpets, nooks and crannies, and cats. There is a slight learning curve depending on your technique. Heavy-handed puffing will result in the "blob" outcome noted by more than one reviewer here. This didn't seem like a big deal to me. I just brush the blobs down into the carpet, or vacuum up the excess. Once you get the hang of things, there's little effort involved. Again, a little practice beforehand will pay dividends. And don't overfill the cannister (two-thirds is fine for me). This works like a little bellows and requires air to function. It may be necessary from time to time to tap the container to loosen the contents a bit. Bakers among you will understand--it's like rapping your flour sifter to clear it. There is, as others have noted, no way to make the pest pistol air-tight when storing DE in it. I think this is a very minor issue. In the mid-south, land of high humidity, I simply store my pest pistol in a large zip-lock bag and it's ready to go at any time. I don't fool with funnels or other gagetry to load the container. I simply spoon DE into the opening with a standard soup spoon out of the silverware drawer. It works fine. (Granted, I might want to find a less casual method if I were using a toxic product. But for food-grade DE? Nah.) Aside from dusting the environment, I have found the pest pistol perfect for dusting my cats. The little applicator can be slid into their fur and "poof," they're puffed. Just be sure the business end isn't actually touching the skin. The end hole in the applicator is super tiny and easily blocked. Just get as close as you can under the fur, without touching skin, give the pistol a squeeze, and then distribute the DE with your hands. I can "do" a cat with about 12-15 strategically placed puffs. A big dog would take more time, but still so worth it. What I love about DE and the pistol application is that even if I overdo things, the surplus DE is distributed by the animals in the places they frequent and gives even more protection from those rascally fleas. Plus it's not a powdered neurotoxin, as most insecticides are, so if it's on the furniture, or the vanity, or my bedsheets, I don't care. The Pest Pistol and diatomaceous earth go together like "love and marriage." I can't imagine one without the other.

Practice makes perfect. Unfortunately with BB's you'l have plenty of practice. This red bottomed accordion will save your back. With BB's its crucial that you seal up every crevice and dust evenly. Trying to do so with your hand or by sifting the bag just isn't worth it. Also, you can use this in a few different ways to get different results. WALL UP SOLDIER, this is a war. No time for slacking A) Red bottom down lightly press the depressed side of the top - Even dustings B) Squeeze the entire top down - Bursts of DE (hitting hard to reach crevasses. Tip Shake the Pistol side to side as you spray. It seems to get a more even coat. Not good for - Making walls. Strategy that has left us bite free for over 2 months: Please note that this portion of the review is how to lay DE, to rid yourself of these things more is required but not relevant to this product. WALL UP We created hedge like mazes and sectioned off portions of the room. 1) The Bed - Create a perimeter around your bed of DE 2-3 inches high 1-2 inches thick, any less and they will climb over. I poured large piles of DE and then used a card to create the walls. Don't try the pistol for this. 2) Section your bed area off from the rest of the room - We made an additional wall of DE separating the bed from the rest of the room. Most importantly creating a secondary barrier from the door. Basically we cut the room in half. 3) Pistol time - Dust BOTH sides off these walls. The BB's will walk up to the wall and turn around, but the key is that they had to walk across DE to get to the wall. Without this dusting you aren't killing them you're just preventing them from biting you. 4) Dust baseboards. - Fill all baseboards with DE 5) Unscrew light switches and pack the inside with DE (Youtube how its simple) 6) Make Islands to walk on. I laid tiny footprint sizes pieces of carpet...you guessed it I WALLED these up as well. Little islands of rest for your feet will help keep the DE on the floor and off your body. The walls help prevent BB's from making these islands of piece their home. 7) Be prepared to have your room look like a millionaires CokaCola minus the cola Party. Its going to be dusty and its going to be uncomfortable. You need to sleep in the bed you need to draw them to your walls. You're room will be a barren wasteland for a few weeks. Keep your clothes in bags outside of the bedroom, and be sure to heat treat everything before you remove it from the room. If you stay focused you will rid yourself of them. I wish you all the best of luck!

Edit: Turn this on the side for easiest control. Should have figured it out earlier, but if you turn it sideways, you can easily control the volume of powder that comes out. Plus it is easy to squeeze like an accordion. Works well after some trial and error. I'm using this for diotomaceous earth for fleas, but also against small black ants. It works upright or upside down, but it takes some practice since upright hardly blows anything out and upside down blows a stream out if you do it with the nozzle horizontal. Most people will want a volume of powder in between those 2 extremes. ` When upright, very little powder comes out. To get more, shake it before squeezing to get some powder airborne inside. Something like a sharp shake or two, then squeeze. Or for a bit more, I found that smacking it against my thigh bumps the powder up at the same time the air is blowing out and a good amount comes out. If upside down, angle it upward so that air is sorta skimming powder off the top instead of blowing mostly powder right through the nozzle. If you do it with the nozzle horizontal, a strong stream of powder will get blown out. That might be ok for outdoor use, but for indoors that's a lot of powder. The fuller the container, the steeper the angle has to be. I recommend some kind of respirator or mask when doing this since the powder takes a while to settle. It isn't necessary, but if you use a flashlight while you're doing this, you'll see a lot more powder in the air than you think there is.

The DE did not really deter the sowbugs as I thought it would. I would recommend another product or strategy - in my case I needed to seal all of the baseboards and threshholds in the home where the sowbugs were coming in, but I did notice that soon after entry they were dying in larger numbers. The better solution would have been to seal the baseboards, period. I can see that using the DE outside along all walls where sowbugs might get into the home might help decrease their numbers over time, but it appears that unless the home is sealed properly this has little effectiveness as an indoor control method. In addition to that, cleanup after application is annoying and involves frequent cleaning of your vacuum as the dust clogs the filters and soils the tank (of bagless vacs) quickly. That said, this is a lightweight dispenser. The DE is a dessicant - its crystalline structure is sharp and gets inside the pest's bodies and kills them by drying them out. It doesn't work immediately but is not harmful to pets and children. One caution: Follow the instructions to sift the diatomaceous earth (without raising a dust cloud) before putting it in the small pump device and it works well - it will still need periodic shaking but once you get the hang of it, you can disperse the dust evenly where you need it. I used it along baseboards to get it into spaces where sowbugs were coming in. If you need to treat a larger area I'd recommend another dispenser system but for in-home use this works fine. Using light pressure so as not to raise a large cloud of dust (you might want to wear a dust mask when applying this) is best. And again it appears to be more useful as an outdoor deterrent rather than interior application. The fact that it is food-grade and essentially harmless (unless you breath the dust in, which I'm sure can be problematic) and that it does kill the bugs without dangerous chemicals is a plus. However, not effective or efficient for my application.

Stinks & then my 3 container tests showed bad results of the all natural stinky 2 sprays I bought = took 4 to 6 times as long to kill the bugs barely, where Tempo was fast and 100% Lets see, Orkin wanted $4k and we bought covers for 4 bedrooms and 3 sprays and a ga'zillion sets of costers & dropped $580 here & bugs are gone, Yahoo !!!!!!!! *** Tempo spray is the first key (used 1 gal pump sprayer from hardware store) * Well......... Vacuum the crap out of everything: matress, box springs, spray them well, then when dry hours later or we waited overnight, then bag'em baby, * then coasters to make your bed an island!!!!!! ->> guess what, busted the bugs, and they dwindeled as the days went on. That is vacum and spray every "friggen" thing in site, a lot of work, but do it, dressers, cabinets, closets, window and door moldings, and then when dry we used the bug DE. spring clean, horrible job, but do it turkey's, clean it, don't skimp! -->>Not for slackers, or pay ORkin $4k, your choice 1. spray = Tempo Ultra SC 240 ML (8.12 oz) Multi Use Pest Control Insecticide 2. 6 of BEAP 10013 4-Pack Detector Bed Bug Coaster Trap 3. Safer Brand 5168 Diatomaceous Earth Powder, 7 Ounces 4. Covers = SafeRest Premium Waterproof Lab Certified Bed Bug Proof Sold by: EverydayPure 5. crap stinks, never used it Bed Bug Killer By Eco Defense - All Natural Organic Formula Kills Bed Bugs on Contact - 100% Guaranteed Effective - Fastest Working Bed Bug Spray and 6. crap stinks also never used it = PROOF 100% Effective Bed Bug Spray (16oz. Spray Bottle) Sold by: Terramera, LLC

In my long working career I was a professionally registered pest control tech. Though, really, a termite/moisture/pest/ etc salesman. We got bed bugs and I knew from my background they were tough to get rid of and expensive. I decided on the spray (at Wally-Mart) and the dia-earth approach. Months later, we still see an occasional bed bug but they are more often than not dried up and dead. That's they way, uh-huh, we like them, uh-huh,... uh-huh. Fine product and it takes a little time to develop that "fine touch" you need for a powder but you will get it and this will help you. I think this might help with zombies as well. Worth every penny and I don't hesitate to give it 5 stars and the Admiral's approval. Revision on 3-4-2014: Regarding this item and-earth. First thing sift your d-earth with an old fashioned flour sifter and put it into a container - I use the plastic coffee cans (the red whatever brand and the blue Max-House)because this keeps the powder dry and you don't have to keep opening your main package of d-earth. Load the sifted d-earth into the the pest pistol. It always works best when used upside down. Use softer squeezes pointing downward or into cracks. Yes, it can be a bit messy and airborne but practice makes perfect the d-earth acts as a drying agent but also contains silicates which cause "cut's" in insects so you have a 2 way killing action.

I bought this duster after we had a brief problem with tiny ants showing up this summer on one of our kitchen counters. I'd noticed them exiting one of the electrical outlets above the counter. Although we have an annual contract with Terminex and I could have just called to have them come out, I didn't want to be bothered with arranging a time window to be home for their technician. And since it seemed apparent where they were coming from, I decided to try to get rid of the ants myself. I ordered Diatomaceous Earth and this Pest Pistol (sounds like the name of a rock band!) and went to work. One thing I learned is that 5 pounds of diatomaceous earth if a LOT. Unless I come up with some other uses for it, I'm sure it'll last me a couple of lifetimes. This Pest Pistol mini duster is pretty easy to use. Just remove the plastic lid, add some powder, make sure that the tube nozzle is securely pushed into the lid, and give a squeeze to the plastic accordian duster. It's probably obvious when you look at the duster, but in case there's any doubt, you squeeze top and bottom together to deflate the accordian ridges rather than squeezing from side to side. For my purposes with the electrical outlet, it worked perfectly. I simply removed the electrical outlet cover that the ants were coming from, stuck the tip of the spray nozzle a couple of inches into the wall opening, and gave a few good squeezes to the duster while pointing it in different directions inside the wall. Most of the diatomaceous earth puffed into the wall space, with minimal dust coming back out of the uncovered outlet hole. Since it was so simple and quick to do, I went ahead and did a bunch of other outlets just in case. It completely got rid of the ants. While the duster did great with puffing into the wall space, I would have been less thrilled with it if I was using it in an open space -- like in treating carpet or area rugs for fleas. I tried a few sample dustings on an area rug and found that it didn't create anything like a uniform dusting of powder. Instead, it left a heavy concentration in spots and missed others. It's fairly easy to squeeze when operating it. I found that it worked better for me to use both hands. Also, don't fill it all the way or it can't depress enough to puff out the powder.

Best invention for dusting ever. I can do 30 birds in no time with barely disturbing them.

My husband used to be a pest control guy and wanted a duster. He says this is a little harder to control the flow of dust than his old one, but he really likes that the nozzle is plastic. His old one had a metal piece that made dusting inside receptacle and switch plate areas a little tricky.

way overpriced. same product from others ranges $6.00 to $12.00. works fine, very simply.

holds much more than my rubber professional bottle. Shots well and far when needed. I dont understand why these models are so expensive in canadian dollors. ie. aprox. double. Will not be long lasting from cheaper construction.