How effective would it be to have a UV or similar light that will attract bugs in the room to it so you can kill them so they don’t suck your blood (mosquitoes) while your doing stuff indoors?
How can this be done cheaply, and is there a vision hazard to doing so?
Bug zapper?
smaller and cheaper, but the right idea
Mosquitoes aren’t attracted very well at all by UV light - they tend to gravitate towards dark areas more than light, but what really gets them interested is carbon dioxide.
I have the first one (Stinger). I think the second one I have listed should work just as well as the stinger though. I use the stinger in my garage to catch anything that gets in. If a fly gets into the kitchen, I’ll put it in the kitchen overnight. It catches the bugs 100% of the time for me. You just have to be careful when you shut it off because when the fan shuts off, the bugs can escape. Just make sure you don’t open up the trap until you get outside.
What a horrid way to die! From the Stinger listing:
it is, but i hate them buggers!
at least they dont get a stake through the heart like the vampires they are H)
I dunno, this sounds worse:
What are the signs and symptoms of malaria?
Symptoms of malaria include fever and flu-like illness, including shaking chills, headache, muscle aches, and tiredness. Nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea may also occur. Malaria may cause anemia and jaundice (yellow coloring of the skin and eyes) because of the loss of red blood cells. If not promptly treated, the infection can become severe and may cause kidney failure, seizures, mental confusion, coma, and death.
It is an interesting idea to have an indoor one. The problem with the outdoor ones is that they dont attract mosquitos all that much, but DO attract all kinds of other, beneficial insects and zap the heck out of them.
I guess indoors, everything inside is fair game so being discriminating is less useful.
Also, certain breeds of mosquitos are attacted to different things. In any case they probably wont bypass a nice warm CO2-emitting child to go check out the pretty lights…
In the spring in the Death Valley area, we get these hatches of different bugs, especially these big disgusting biting flying ants and gazillions of moths. They are attracted to any light source and can get through the tiniest cracks around screens. Soon at night your TV or computer screen is covered with vile insects bouncing off that and your face and in your hair.
So as a decoy, we tried putting up a bug zapper outside. They are more attracted to the bug zapper than LED/LCD screens and go there to meet their electrical demise. I suppose I should feel bad because moths are responsible for pollinating so many plants around here, but there are so many MILLIONS of things flying around out here that I can’t believe that we are effecting pollination to any measurable degree.
Anyway, we rarely use the bug zapper diversion any more because it had a bad side effect. The bugs get zapped and fall out of the zapper onto the ground. There the scorpions find them. Before long we had a seething mass of scorpions under the bug light waiting for a free lunch. So when the light is not in use, we now have an increased population of nasty scorpions, looking for food. In fact, we have pretty much discontinued the zapper for this reason. Use it maybe once a couple weeks when the bugs get really bad, but it sure worked great at the beginning!
The best bug zapper I ever saw was built by a guy with a cafe in the Northwest Territories. It was made from closely spaced brazing rods and powered by a furnace ignition transformer. Attractant was simply a couple of UV light bulbs behind the device.
We are plagued up here in summer by Bull flies (I think also called ‘Horse flies’ by southerners) - they’d hit those brazing rods and pop like a .22 cartridge and give up the ghost in a mini lightning bolt. All that was left was a bit of ash drifting to the bottom. Truly a thing of beauty. We’d sit and have coffee and actually wait for a fly to come along, just so we could watch!
I suspect anyone touching it would have lost a finger, at least. 
Ah, the memories!
I’ve always wanted to scale one up and use it on crows.
Yeah, I know. I might be a redneck. 
You guys are priceless :bigsmile:
I read some time ago since they attract bugs, the best thing to do is buy your neighbor( s ) a bug zapper.
Try making own co2 traps from plastic drink bottles: Making a Mosquito Trap | ThriftyFun