Mosquito Magnet vs Skeeter Vac vs Mega Catch vs Bite Shield | Traps Tested!

[Music] [Music] hey everybody today we are not out here to talk about our adorable coordinating mountain garden shirts we are here to talk about mosquitoes and mosquito catching devices here we have collected four of what i think are the top mosquito catchers available right now in the u.s so what do we have here rob well we have four different ones this one is actually labeled a mosquito magnet which we mistakenly call all mosquito catching things because they were one of the first ones out on the market but the one we've had longer is actually this guy right here which is why it looks so beat up this is the one that started this whole process and this is the skeeter vac 5100 this one here is one that we got after the skeeter back we probably bought this what two years ago i think right something like that because i wanted something that was different i wanted to see if there was something that was better and this one had some great ratings on it this one's the mega catch and this one is different because this one uses a co2 container and the rest of these guys all use propane this one right here that is a little wobbly because maybe it's missing a screw maybe it's not this one's the cheapest one and this is the coolatron bite shield in this video we are not going to be crossing the tricky bridge of do mosquito vacuums catchers whatever you want to call them do they work in terms of reducing mosquito population we're here to answer do they catch mosquitoes because there are no peer-reviewed studies on how the efficacy of these actually you know limit the populations of mosquitoes right so the theory is that these break the life cycle that you're catching the adults the adults aren't going to lay eggs those eggs aren't going to hatch into other little blood thirsty little insects and then they aren't going to get caught in these mosquito traps so let's go down the line one by one and talk about how they work and how they're a little bit different from one another so first up we have the tried and true skeeter vac this one again is the 5100 this one's been with us for a long time as i said all these guys run on propane now i have seen a lot of folks asking can you run these on your household gas service if you're living in the city and you have natural gas the answer is no but if you're living in the country like we are and you have propane the answer is certainly yes now i have noticed that the answer from all the manufacturers is no absolutely not you should use 5 gallon propane tanks well the big reason for the skeeter vac is they're owned by blue rhino so obviously they want you to be buying more blue rhino but you can totally run it off your 250 gallon or larger propane tank at home we've been doing that for years and years now now that now that is if the pressure is right so that's true that's one caveat so you have to have the correct pressure regulator but this is running off the same pressure as the barbecue right here and your your stove etc so after your pressure reducing valve now this guy has a different kind of catchment mechanism than the others too it has the sticky trap thing which you can take off it's time to change because we're going to be talking about how well each of these catches mosquitoes we're going to be comparing them against one another so it has the usual attack trap what i like about this one is what else is that catching there that's catching all those biting flies yeah it's catching flies a few beetles some spiders which i don't know if that's good or not there's some mosquitoes on it though this one's not catching moths and one of the those the bug zappers and things like that you could put mosquito attractant in those catch moths and not all moths are bad and so that seems like a bad thing to do but these guys don't really seem to catch too much by-product um fighting flies are definitely sticking to that trap but interesting enough no biting flies are in this little tray so we'll go ahead and pop the new new one on there and then we'll take the tray out so you can see how that looks with this guy the mosquito attractant goes in this compartment on the top that's where you put your lures right in there i don't know if i'd touch that cause now the mosquitoes are really gonna love you and we'll talk about attractants in a second here that little cover goes on so that way you can tune how much lure you're letting out and then the mosquitoes get sucked in right there so that's what's inside a bunch of really dried mosquitoes rob is going to go take that for a scrub so things can be absolutely fair but that brings us to one of the other attracted mechanisms in here we have some little leds in there supposedly flashing lights help attract mosquitoes but the big thing is the co2 and the heat that's coming out of this because propane is going in it's being catalyzed we get heat and co2 coming out and the excess heat is used to run the fan that's one of the reasons i really like this particular model is because it doesn't need a cord you can actually put a propane tank on this you can put it way out in your yard out in the forest wherever you may need it to be and it will start sucking at mosquitoes without an electric cord around and that's my main complaint about this guy right here the mega catch 900 i think it's named 900 because it costs 900. this is the most expensive mosquito trap we have here and this guy has i think a few flaws first off it's electric powered so you do have to have an ac power line in order for this to run it's not going to generate its own electricity we have some leds going on in there as well it is the fanciest one it has a little lcd screen here it was the first one we bought with an lcd you can adjust the amount of co2 coming out of it so we have the co2 tank right back here you do have to have that filled separately so that is kind of a pain so you have a tank and you have the ac line and then the mosquitoes get sucked in to this through this area here and then blown into this little fabric basket that's down here underneath now my complaint about the fabric basket is it doesn't wear as well as the stainless steel that we have on this skeeter vac here now see it's been nicely scrubbed this is a stainless steel one this is the original one that we bought with that does seem to last quite a bit longer than what we find in here the mega catch also came with a little black skirt that wrapped around the bottom part of the unit but that quickly degraded and fell off and who knows where it is in the forest that brings us along to the budget model the coolatron bite shield i'm intrigued by this one because it's very inexpensive this one was 300 bucks it is by far the least expensive model here you can take this little cover off right here and see what's going on so the mosquitoes are attracted by the heat and co2 that's being put out by this it is burning propane right here but it needs an electric cord which is right here we have a little power adapter right there so it is ac powered and it uses propane and it uses a flame which is also a little bit different it's actually an open flame right there inside that little window and the top does get a little bit warm same sort of leds going on up top bugs get sucked in there and then they get pushed into this little stainless steel cup this is the smallest cup available and i just let a mosquito out sorry about that it's also worth noting that this is the loudest in the bunch now the mega catch isn't terribly quiet but this guy is certainly louder this guy right here is the mosquito magnet executive which sounds very fancy but surprisingly this wasn't the most expensive unit this is only a little bit more expensive than the skeeter vac and there are definitely a few things that i like about it here we have the mosquito catching widget it's kind of an odd shape there isn't it it does have a little door so the mosquitoes actually go in that little flap there you can see a little flap opens as you put it in the unit so that way you can take it out and they're completely trapped in there so that's kind of nice the other ones i think we may have noticed a flaw with the mosquito magnet executive this uh this little guy is this little guy is kind of melted in the sun i think maybe that's what's happened so what happened here is that we bought this a week ago and it's been sitting out here on the patio you can actually see that the plastic has been slightly deformed there it's melted that's not the original shape you can see a little bit better from overhead and then if i look at the insert right here you can see the inserts also been a little melted right there that is pretty disappointing because this was one of the more expensive models here all these other models have been out here on the same patio this guy's been out here on the same patio for years and years so definitely keep that in mind i have to say i'm pretty bummed by this this is the plastic segment that's melted a little bit and it's pinning the fan blade so i'm just going to grind it down a little bit so that way it's not doing that we'll put it all back together then we'll get it going this is what's going on here you can see what's going on inside the propane comes in there we have the catalyst going on right in there i'm assuming that this is sort of one of those catalyst style burner things so essentially the propane is being regulated controlled there is heat being given off we then have a piezoelectric unit that's making electricity that's what's actually powering everything in here the fan all that sort of stuff and then the co2 is being exhausted right down this area here that's also where the mosquitoes come in so the mosquitoes come in that same area they get sucked in here and then they get sucked in via that fan and then caught inside that trap this is the same basic mechanism that we see in a skeeter vac only it's arranged a little bit differently all right we've made some manufacturer non-sanctioned modifications uh fan is now fixed it is okay taped up the basket again i have to say i'm a little bit disappointed by that right away because i like a lot of other things about this more than any of these other traps i like the way it's constructed the construction does feel really nice and solid i like the fact that they're these really nice stainless steel grates on the side so that way where the air exits the machine it goes through these stainless steel grates to help keep things from getting in there like spiders that sort of thing what else is interesting about this one well you can see that we have a mode button here this guy will reduce your propane usage versus the other traps because the coolatron and the skeeter vac are running all the time the mega catch does have a timer function so you can cause it to let use less co2 during the day times where mosquitoes aren't out this one will automatically do that it will turn off the co2 or drastically reduce it during times of the day where the mosquito trap knows that mosquitoes are not going to be very active this is going to end up saving you a bit more on propane all the mosquito catchers have their own branded attractants it seems like the vast majority of them use this chemical right here one octane three all and uh this is actually pretty cheap the mosquito attractants seem pretty expensive um give this a whiff honey this one smells like body odor i guess that'd be probably the best answer maybe sort of like funky body odor this is what's in most mosquito attractants out there one octane 3ol and that is pretty inexpensive by the bottle then if we start taking a look at some of the more interesting ones lurex etc that was a brand that's been out there for a while lurex has a bunch of different things in it and a lot of research that went into this says that hexanoic acid is one of the things that we should put in there and this um how do you describe that i don't smell that as much oh yeah it smells like barnyard like zoo like stale old nasty zoo this smells like if you peed in your underwear and you let it bake in a car for a while and then this one didn't really smell like anything this is lactic acid this is what you know people produce when you're out there in the yard working only that doesn't smell so bad only people mainly produce lactic acid inside i don't know how much is coming out but it's a thing uh and then there's um ammonium hydrogen carbonate because apparently we give off a little bit of ammonia and maybe mosquitoes are sensitive to that but the big things seem to be the hexanoic acid and the one octane 3ol so to be fair we're going to put the same attractant that we're going to home brew ourselves around but not necessarily in the trappers and put it near by the trap so that way everybody is equal there and we're just catching the question of how many mosquitoes can they actually suck down i do have to say we don't put mosquito attracted very often in our traps how often do we do it once a year maybe-ish something like that it seems like co2 and heat are the big big attractants for the mosquitoes at least in our area mosquitoes are less active during the middle of the day and in the middle of the night and that's why traps like the mosquito magnet and the mega catch have timers built in so that way they can reduce gas usage during those times of the day if you want to obviously co2 over there for the mega catch because it's not using propane it's the only one again that doesn't use propane and propane over here for the mosquito magnet we've spaced all the traps apart out here on the patio and this is an area that is in the shade in the morning and in the shade in the afternoon as well and that's exactly what you want for mosquito traps time flies when you're collecting mosquitoes and it has now been a week actually a week and one day and we're gonna take a look and see how many mosquitoes these guys caught now why a weekend one day well i decided to add the extra day because inside of all of these traps it takes about 24 hours for the live mosquitoes to actually die because they become desiccated as the breeze is blowing past them by the forest air fan that's what kills the mosquitoes in the end so i decided for an actual seven days worth of catch that we need to add an extra day and as we remove some of these catchment devices you're gonna notice that some of the live mosquitoes are going to escape now that's gonna be different based on the design we'll go into that now the mosquito magnet probably has the best design for this so you can see as i remove this lid here if i can actually do this with one hand it is pretty stiff you'll notice that we have this removable cartridge and then there's that flap in there that we showed you earlier that keeps the live mosquitoes inside you can then throw away this entire trap unit if you want to and something else i noticed is that some mosquitoes end up right up here in this upper section because they haven't gone through the normal suck-up nozzle i guess you'd call it and they get trapped in this area instead but it does desiccate them anyway you can see there's one mosquito sort of buzzing right there trying to get out another nice touch with the mosquito magnet is that it knows when its little cartridge has been removed and you'll notice it turns off the fan shuts itself down there to save propane over here in our least expensive model you'll notice that we get just a cup right there and i think one or two buzzed out but there is no lid to cover this cup so you just have to sacrifice those ones that have left over here on the skeeter vac it does have a slide in plastic lid that you can use to keep the mosquitoes from escaping so i'm going to attempt to see how many live ones are in here because i have long since lost that cover it looks like there are four four mosquitoes buzzing around there yet four that got away five six six got away so that's rather unfortunate i'll add six to this score because obviously if you bought one of these new and you were careful unlike me you would have kept that little plastic cover and you can see where it goes it goes right in these little slots that allows you to say wash them all down with water or something else to kill them before you toss them out obviously the skeeter vac also has the sticky trap all the way around and this is where we can talk about secondary catch you can see that it has caught a bunch of flies now in our area we have biting flies that are also attracted by co2 and this trap does catch those biting flies as well now we have some secondary catch also in this mega catch mosquito trap but this is a little bit more unfortunate secondary catch because if we go in here and take a look inside there you can see that we have moths now not all moths are bad some moths are pollinators so catching moss is not exactly an ideal thing for a mosquito trap this guy has a bag that cinches at the top so that way you can dispose of your mosquitoes you can see a few things flying around inside there i think that's actually one small moth inside and the mega catch is the only one here that was catching moths the skeeter vac and the mosquito magnet and the cooler tron unit they didn't catch any moths now i know mosquito counting normally goes better with beer but rather unfortunately i drank my last beer last night so glass rose is just gonna have to do it and we are going to start our counting with the cooler tron unit very clearly it did not catch as many mosquitoes as the other units did you can see what they look like once they're caught down there they really shrivel up so it's gonna be a little bit tricky to count we're just going to go on basically black dots here our total for the cooler tron unit was 157 mosquitoes 22 flies and one moth that's a little bit better than i thought let's take a look at the next one next up we have the mega catch with uh it looks like one two active mosquitoes that just flew the coop there so we will turn it over and see what else we can shake out of this and the numbers are in the mega catch managed to catch more moths the mosquitoes just 42 mosquitoes were caught by this particular trap so rather unfortunately i'm gonna call that a little bit of a fail here now let's move on our next one up is tricky and sticky it is the skeeter vac here because it has two methods of catching mosquitoes and the two methods are interesting one is the sticky trap that's wrapped around the outside and the other one is the filter where it vacuums like the rest of the traps [Music] in the fan force trap we had 89 mosquitoes one thing that i thought was interesting is that the mosquitoes that were in here were the bigger juicier more adult-sized mosquitoes and the ones that landed on the tack trap for the most part were seemingly the slightly smaller mosquitoes but again the birds around here do eat some of those off there so it was a little bit difficult to tell exactly what size mosquito was attached to the legs that are attached to that tack trap and now it's time to move on to the mosquito magnet now this one is going to be a little bit different because of course there are still some live mosquitoes wandering around in there so we'll see how that goes now to be fair i should include the live mosquitoes in the mosquito vacuums count because of course they're still caught in there and the live ones kind of escaped on the other ones there's no secondary catch going on here in the mosquito magnet so no biting flies were caught but also no beneficial insects that shouldn't have been caught were in this trap and the total for the mosquito magnet is 231 with no secondary kills no flies no moths nothing like that with just 42 mosquitoes caught and 53 moths caught this mega catch unit is my least favorite here and it is absolutely the one that i'm gonna unplug and just toss into the basement i had a feeling that this didn't work as well as the other mosquito magnets or mosquito catching devices whatever you want to call them when we first got it but i really wanted to see how well it performed compared to the other options that's really why i ended up doing this video i had a feeling it didn't work as well it definitely doesn't seem to have worked as well so i'm just going to turn off this co2 canister and i don't know what i'm going to do with this much co2 but catching mosquitoes apparently isn't really this thing's bag if on the other hand you are looking to catch moths and maybe catch a mosquito now and then then put the mega cats in your shopping list this also receives low marks because it is by far the most expensive one here you have been voted off the island in third place we have the cooler tron bite shield this guy sucked up more than 150 mosquitoes it was a little bit behind the others but this is in third place because of its construction it doesn't feel as robust as the others i think i'm missing a bolt or something here because it is a little bit wobbly and from other things that i've read it's not supposed to be so clearly something seems to be wrong with my particular unit but the build quality is still not the same as the others and we have a very small catchment cup so if you live near the ozarks or something like that this is probably going to get full in a day even out here where i had all these other traps going on it still got much fuller than the others it's also a little bit louder and that's why i've unplugged it it also needs ac power so you can't just put it way out in your yard somewhere away from folks it is gonna have to be somewhere that you have power and this is the only design that gives you an active open flame right back here it's the only one that gets pretty warm on the outside compared to what we see going on in the mosquito magnet or in the skeeter vac i'm a little torn about this particular mosquito magnet and that's why this is coming in second place now there are additional models of mosquito magnet that don't operate exactly like this one here but they employ basically the same technology as far as catching the mosquitoes what's interesting about this one and why i bought this one is that it doesn't need a power cord and the rest of the mosquito magnet lineup does the timer functions on this one are also pretty handy because that'll save you propane by reducing the propane consumed during times of the day where mosquitoes aren't very active however right now they're definitely active i can feel them around here so this is exactly when this guy should be running but as i said before i am a little bit disappointed in the design of this because this was only here for about two weeks out in the sun out in the back patio theoretically an area where lots of people would put their mosquito magnets it was off and then the plastic melted inside and caused some issues we haven't had that problem with the skeeter vac or the mega catch the reason that this wasn't running for two weeks is i was waiting for the cooler tron unit to arrive the first one ended up broken and shipping so i had to get another one and that delayed our start and that's how we discovered this particular problem if they could fix that one flaw i suspect this would be my top pick i love the fact that the mosquito catchment area is much larger than the rest of these units here so this is going to not get clogged as quickly it's going to hold more mosquitoes if you live in an area that's really really thick with mosquitoes this is going to be the one that's going to catch the most without additional maintenance but with that flaw in mind my top pick has to be the skeeter vac right here it didn't catch quite as many mosquitoes but it also caught the biting flies that are around here without any extra secondary catch and that does surprise me because i'm in an area where there are moths around and i would have figured they would have gotten stuck to the tack trap but i didn't get any evidence of moths being stuck to there and having birds eat them so there we have it if you're looking for one of these mosquito vacuumy devices take a look at the skeeter vac and of course the mosquito magnet lineup this is again the top end one that is self-powered so there's no need for an ac line if you want to spend less money but get the same technology then you can get the ac powered versions of this mosquito magnet right here and i suspect if i were to do this again at least for having one next to the house i might just get the ac powered version because it is less expensive than this model right here this is the most expensive one in the mosquito vac lineup now i suspect that if i had to do this over again i would probably buy a mosquito magnet one of the ac powered ones to replace this skeeter vac because this is always parked right next to the house it's actually attached to the house's propane line as i said earlier now in this video none of these devices were bought by their respective manufacturers i actually bought all of these myself because i was curious to see how they would work we've had the mosquito vac or the skeeter vac right over there for ages and ages and ages we've had the mega catch for about two and a half years and i haven't really been that happy with it this coolatron surprised me a little bit i'm not quite sure where i'm gonna stick this one but maybe it will have a home this guy i'm definitely keeping and i'm gonna put this one further away from the house where we really need that remote capability and i don't want to have to lug a propane cylinder down the hill if you have a bigger yard like i do we're on almost 9 acres here then you may need multiple mosquito magnets or mosquito vacuums or whatever you want to call these guys to try and keep the mosquito population low you want to try and put these upwind from the area that you're usually dining or sitting in so that way the mosquitoes are attracted over to that and each one has an effective area supposedly of maybe about an acre depending on the prevailing wind and a bunch of other conditions as well obviously you should be engaging on all the other mosquito safe practices like not leaving standing water around all that sort of good stuff but if you are living in an area with a lot of mosquitoes and you want to try and cut down their population a little bit these two guys are the ones that i would look at and again i would definitely connect them to your house propane service i know i know i know they claim that you shouldn't do that but trust me this guy has been operating that way for years and years and years absolutely no problem at all we haven't converted this one yet but i don't suspect that there will be any issues the prime reason that we don't see that in entries like this skeeter vac right here again is that they're owned by blue rhino so clearly they want you to buy those refillable blue rhino containers and then take them back to the store they don't want you even filling them up at your local gas station where you could get propane refills that's what's going on in the skeeter vac that's why they're telling you not to run it off your household propane service as long as the pressure is right you should be just fine be sure and let me know what you think about all that down there in the comment section below and let me know if you have any experience with some of the other mosquito attractant solutions that are out there on the market let me know what else we should try in a future video of course if you have any other questions that we can address in a future video let us know down there in the comment section as well i'll see all of you [Music] later [Music] you

Channel: The Mountain Garden

Views: 212,983

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Id: GFB5UGeiozg

Length: 25min 12sec (1512 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 24 2020