When our HOA stopped spraying for mosquitoes as a result of some very loud and self-righteous complaints from two households who were completely convinced, without any supporting evidence, that a coordinated spraying of permethrin by the county during the evening hours while children usually aren’t playing outside and under the oversight of an entomologist represented a greater health hazard than the mosquitoes themselves, I wanted to find an alternative solution. Those households may be right - I don’t pretend to have any scientific data - I’m simply observing that the complainants don’t either. And I’m a little suspicious of their grasp of statistics given that the narrative they seem to have projected was one of disapproval by a majority of the neighborhood when, as I said, I counted two complaining households. But it’s not as though I like the idea of spraying chemicals. This electrical zapper sounded like a pretty clean solution that couldn’t possibly hurt humans through some poorly understood biochemical boogeyman, so I was looking forward to trying it. There are so many positive reviews of this product that I had no idea bug zappers are as controversial a product as they are. You see, it may well have killed mosquitoes, but it also killed a lot of moths — and I have no quarrel with the moths. It’s not clear to me what proportion of the bugs killed are actually biting/stinging insects, which are the ones that I care about. Further complicating matters, there are many different species of mosquitoes and it’s not clear how strongly attracted all of them (or any of them, really) are to this light. It seems to be a fairly indiscriminate insect slaughter at best, and at worst it might actually be doing a better job of attracting and killing non-biting/stinging insects than killing the bugs I actually want gone. Some people have even expressed the opinion that they actually increase the local bug activity because the light attracts them but doesn’t do a great job of killing them. I don’t have any scientific data to offer, and again there are many different species of mosquitoes so what works for you may not work for someone else. It certainly didn’t seem to make our mosquito situation any worse when we tried it for a week, but that’s just my subjective impression from sitting outside. And beyond the questionable impact on your local insect population, some of whom play critical environmental roles that I don’t pretend to understand, it’s actually a lot more disruptive to the quiet enjoyment of my property than I’d expected. I positioned it about 50 feet away from my back porch so as not to attract bugs to where I’d be sitting, and I found the bright light and zapping sounds to be fairly disruptive — to the point that I even started to worry it might bother the neighbors too (and we’re on 1 acre lots, so we’re not exactly sitting right on top of each other). And UV light supposedly isn’t good for the eyes. It also needed to be brushed fairly often. Maybe in time the volume of bugs would go down as it decimates the local population, but I was cleaning it daily during my short experiment with the device. If you’re sure you want a bug zapper then this particular model seems like a fine one to buy. I saw no particular defects in quality. My experience has simply turned me off to the whole idea of a bug zapper. I’ve started using something called a skeet-o-trap and am tentatively pleased with it. It’s a fairly low maintenance solution - just add some water now and then - and you don’t need to figure a way to get electricity to the location where you want to set it up. It’s also comparatively inexpensive. There are various proposals on the internet for building your own mosquito trap from a soda bottle, but rumor has it those don’t really work and I find it more than a little irritating how readily these proposals get repeated across the internet by people who seem not to have made even the most basic effort to try to determine whether it actually works. I only claim to be tentatively pleased with the skeet-o-trap at this juncture, having tried it for a few weeks, and will update this review when I feel like I can make a more authoritative conclusion, but I am finding what appear to be dead mosquitoes inside of it.