DynaTrap 3/4 Acre Insect & Mosquito Trap

After a wet summer and Hurricane Matthew, my Orlando home on a drainage pond was soggy and absolutely overrun with mosquitoes. The lanai and front porch were literally covered with them, and going outside just to walk the dogs was a suicide mission. I was able to knock them down for a few days at a time with hardware store pesticide sprays, but that was getting expensive, gross, bad-smelling and probably toxic. As soon as a new batch would breed and move in from outside the spray radius, the place was uninhabitable again. I did a lot of research on mosquito traps and settled on this one. I know some mosquito species aren't attracted to light, but mine certainly are - any covered areas lit at night were mosquito meet-up zones. I didn't really want to fool around with propane or attractants, and thought I'd just give this a shot. Brother and sister, does it catch bugs! The instructions say to give it 2-4 weeks to have a good effect, but it provided relief on our back lanai literally overnight. I quit spraying once I ordered it, then plugged it in on the lanai when it arrived -- let it sit right on the floor -- and ran away. By morning I had a huge catch of mosquitoes in the trap (along with a load of moths) and none roosting on the walls and ceiling as usual. I was able to walk the dogs without having to slap any skeeters off me. I was so impressed, I ordered another identical unit for the front porch. At this writing, the one in the back has been running for almost a month, the one in front for two weeks. Just for kicks, I thought I'd wait a bit to empty the front unit so I could show what 2 weeks of catch looks like (attached). That's a hefty mass of mosquitoes in there. Thousands, for sure. Feels weighty in the trash bag. The sweet heft of success. I hardly ever see live mosquitoes hanging around the front porch or back lanai any more, and I haven't sprayed again since buying these traps. It's also dried out and cooled down a little -- 60s at night, 80s in the day -- so hopefully that will all work together to interrupt the breeding cycle and get back to a normal level of mosquito annoyance. So, at least for my situation and with my species of light-loving mosquito, this product totally worked. Tips and thoughts: I'm not doing *anything* to maximize my catch. Both units are sitting in a spot on the floor that is convenient for me and near my outlets; people say to put it higher to maximize how many insects you catch. I'm not using any additional lures. I'm still catching a ton of bugs and most of them are the targets - mosquitoes. Maybe I'll play with better placement and lures eventually, but for me this product has been "set and forget." The visible light also means it catches a lot of moths. I don't have anything against moths especially. My high tech solution -- other than the 2-week catch I photographed for visceral effect -- is to just open the trap when I see moths bouncing around in there. They'll usually flutter right out. I might free a live mosquito or three ... but they're dumb, they'll be back. This model does cast a fairly bright visible blue light. I'm about 100% sure that this visible light is the primary reason it works so well for me, but if you were wanting to use it somewhere that you want to keep dark, that's a non-starter. It's labeled as "whisper quiet," but as others have pointed out, the fan does have an audible hum. To me, it sounds a lot like a buzzy AC circuit, or the humming of a pot on an induction range. It's not awful, but it's not silent. Both of my traps sound identical. Repeating what everybody says: turn it on and leave it on; don't shut it off unless you're emptying the catch bin. Just toggling this trap on when you want to go outside does not work. If hungry mosquitoes have a choice of you or the trap, they'll go for you. You want the trap to vacuum them and their families up when you're not there, and they don't have anything better to do than go check out that funny blue light. The instructions say to put the trap far from your living area, and I did that -- mine is about 30 feet from where I usually sit. But I'm fairly certain that an as-yet unkilled mosquito, hungry for blood, is going to zoom right to me and ignore the trap entirely. The effective defense seems to be to make all those mosquitoes dead, or interrupt the breeding cycle so they never get born, well before you present yourself. Since the light seems to be a very effective part of the lure (at least for my mosquitoes) avoid having other bright lights nearby that may seem more attractive. My traps catch the most mosquitoes when the lanai or porch lights are off at night. I'm planning to switch all my exterior lights to motion sensors for convenience and security with minimum bug appeal. I'm continuing to do all the common sense, non-pesticide things everyone should do to control mosquitoes: get rid of standing water, avoid over-irrigate, treat unavoidably wet areas with Bt ("Mosquito Dunks"), etc. But these traps seem to have made the critical difference in preventing re-infestation from elsewhere. It's really been transformative and wonderful. A final unsolicited editorial comment on the UV + TiO2 = CO2 lure technology: I don't personally believe in it. While the photocatalysis reaction is a genuine phenomenon, scientists have not been able to measure any carbon dioxide plume coming from DynaTrap units (e.g. [...]) and even just thinking theoretically, I head-scratch over where you'd get enough carbon out of other atmospheric carbon compounds to make this a meaningful lure effect ... VOCs? Organic emanations from dead bugs in the catch bin? But I'll give DynaTrap and their resellers a pass on what is possibly a bit of snake oil here, since this trap absolutely does work --- albeit I think for other reasons. It seems well-made, does what it says on the tin, effectively reclaimed my outdoor living areas within days of deployment, and ended my overdeployment of insecticides. I'll report back on reliability after I've run them for a while longer.