Travel Tips

Hand-held Mosquito Zapper

The indoor insect killer is the best way of clearing your immediate vicinity of insects, especially the flying ones such as mosquitoes. The indoor bug killer vaporizes any insect from a mosquito to a gnat instantly on contact with a nice, loud, electrical ‘zap’!

However, this does not mean to say that the hand held insect killer cannot be operated outside, as long as it is not raining. It should be treated like any other high voltage electrical equipment. Keep the electric insect zapper dry and please do not use it while you are standing in the pool!

Models do vary greatly, but there are basically only two kinds of hand held insect zapper: the battery operated bug zapper and the rechargeable electric insect zapper. Both models are equally effective at killing bugs and employ the same principle.

The electric bug killer resembles a ‘junior’ tennis racket, but with three sets of ‘strings’, which are in fact wires. The innermost grid of wires becomes live at the push of a button, while the other two grids, one on either side, are harmless earths.

When an insect is caught between the wires of the hand held insect zapper, it creates a short, which vaporizes it instantly with a loud crack and a flash. The electric insect killer will kill other bugs too, but they just fry instead of explode.

I have been using the rechargeable kind for five years and am extremely satisfied with the indoor insect killer. In fact, the electric bug zapper has come a long way over the last few years. A fully charged electric bug killer is powerful enough to last for several hundred swipes and will hold it’s charge, if unused, for weeks without any appreciable discharge.

The rechargeable battery pack will put up with intensive use for the best part of a year, although its ability to hold a charge for a few weeks slowly diminishes after six or seven months.

The latest indoor bug zapper I’ve had has a main on/off switch, an LED that comes on when it is live (the brightness of this light also indicates the battery’s strength) and an LED that comes on when the zapper is plugged in on recharge.

The instructions say that the bug zapper should be (re)charged for about sixteen hours. However, I usually put it on charge over night once or twice every week or two, although the indoor insect zapper shows a large increase in performance with only a few hours recharging.

The latest model I’ve seen also comes with a powerful beam called a ‘headlamp’. I have found this very useful when out in the garden, but I’m not sure whether it’s meant to attract the flies in the dark so that you can zap them if you’re bored. You know, like an anglerfish.

I’ve used the headlamp on my hand held insect killer for that too, but the light uses a lot of battery power. All in all, the hand held insect zapper is a big asset to any outdoor event. The hand held insect killer is useful to ‘clean out’ your bedroom before retiring; it’s unequalled for evening mosquitoes and it will clear a lunch table of wasps too.

Have you ever heard of an indoor bug zapper? If not, or if you are interested in getting an electronic insect killer, please click one of the hyperlinks to our website or blog.

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