Does a bed bug fogger like Hot Shot actually work?

How a bed bug and flea fogger actually works

A total release fogger like this one is a pressurized can rigged to empty itself in one go. Trigger it, leave the room, and it throws a fine mist of pyrethroid insecticide and Nylar, an insect growth regulator, straight up into the air. Physics does the rest: the mist drifts and settles onto whatever surface is open to the ceiling, which is why the label measures coverage in cubic feet instead of square footage, and why it asks for an unobstructed room. That settling pattern is the whole story of what this can and can't do. Fleas spend most of their life exposed, on carpet fibers, on the floor, on bedding, so a fog that rains down evenly actually reaches them. Nylar is the clever part: it doesn't kill fleas outright, it stops the eggs and larvae already in the carpet from maturing into biting adults, which is how one can claims months of reinfestation control instead of one afternoon of dead bugs. Bed bugs are a different animal, literally. They live inside seams, in wall voids, behind baseboards, deep in box springs, exactly the places a falling mist never reaches. The can's own label hints at this, telling you to use it as part of a broader treatment plan rather than the plan itself. So the fog does real work on anything living out in the open, and almost nothing on anything hiding in a crack, no matter how large the word bedbug sits on the front.