Unfortunately the bed bug epidemic has reached my house. It's not serious, but I want to stop it before it is. The pest control company wants to use a heat treatment where they raise the temperature in the house to 120-140 degrees for four to five hours, which should kill any bugs. The exterminator said that it will have no effect on my CDs and DVDs, but I have my doubts. Any thoughts?

Celsius or farenheit?

I wouldn't chance it.

LosingMy Mind - Farenheit

tecHouse - I tend to agree, although I'm not sure I have a whole lot of options.

How many DVDs are you talking about? I'd be more worried about the DVD cases rather than the DVDs themselves. Direct sunlight is worse than just heat. If you're worried, and you have a DVD/CD you don't want, just stick it in the oven at 140 for a couple hours and see what happens.

Consider how hot it gets in the warehouses and trucks that DVDs sit in before being shipped. I can imagine those places get pretty hot during the summer since a lot of them are coming from Mexico.

Do you have such a small number that it wouldn't be that much of a hassle to stick them in your car or outside while it's going on?

We're probably talking close to 500 dvds. The problem is, if they don't go through the treatment, then I have to find some way to make sure they are all free of bugs/eggs, or this whole thing will have been for nothing.

I've dropped DVDs into boiling water for three minutes in an attempt to repair a scratch. It didn't repair the scratch but it didn't damage the DVD either.

In that case, it seems like you don't have much of a choice. Now would be the time to get any insurance on them if you wanted to stay safe.

I'd be a bit worried about the glue separating from the heat. It may not happen, but I wouldn't want to chance it. Especially not if you have special collector's sets, box sets, or out of print titles. Boxing up 500 dvds shouldn't take too long. Just get a couple of those plastic bins from Kmart or someplace put the dvds someplace safe for a day.

Might be worth the effort to take them and check them for the bugs one by one and box them up and put them in your car for the treatment if they are clear.

Or as others said, stick one in the oven at that temperature for a while and see what happens

He might have a hard time making sure there's not one egg that's hiding in a crevice or other hard to see place? He'll need to check between every tab that holds in the disc and remove the covers to completely inspect the case itself. If there's tiny eggs in the space where the clear plastic connects to the case itself, I don't see how those will be anything but impossible to detect.

I'm not so sure insurance would cover something like this.

My DVDs are kept in the warmest room of the house (during summer months), it only gets as hot as 90°F though. Nothing I've watched has shown any problems. However, VHS, in my experience can't be exposed to any heat.

just take the dvds etc. out of their cases, rinse them if you want, and put them into newly purchased tyvek sleeves (or something) and a newly purchased box to store off site.

as I'm sure you know, bedbugs lay eggs in cracks and crevices, so unless we're talking about binary bedbugs, It's pretty likely they haven't laid eggs on the discs themselves.

leave the cases to undergo the heat treatment. they may warp, but so what?