Scott,
Last year my wife was undergoing chemotherapy following a mastectomy for breast cancer and along with the threat of west nile virus and her lowered immune response during that period I decided to get one after reading all the unbiased reviews I could find. They advertise that the Liberty model is effective for one acre, and that seems to be about right from my experience. We have twenty acres here, and the area behind the house is where most of the flower gardening and evening relaxation
is done so that’s where I placed the machine. Machine placement is critical to the benefit you will obtain. You need to consider the source of the bugs (here that’s about any direction), prevailing wind direction (here that varies, but generally from the north or from the south), and cover for the bugs such as trees, shrubs, etc. Taking all of these factors into consideration determining the proper placement for us required considerable trial and error, but once we had it worked out it worked fine. I generally keep the machine thirty to fifty feet away from where we sit in the evenings and we can hear it, but barely. When mosquitoes are really bad as they are now from all the rain this spring and summer you will notice several right around the machine. You don’t need to be close enough to it to entice them to your sitting area! Those near it will soon be in the net. We still use Deep-Woods OFF repellant when working outside, and I use a propane fogger around the house and shrubs a couple of evenings a week. The mosquito magnet won’t eradicate all of the mosquitoes within the acre, but will certainly reduce the population noticeably.
My shop is about 125’ from the back patio, which is where we tried to “center” the protection area, and I can definitely notice more mosquitoes when I go out that way. My garden is about 250’ and when I go there I’m swarmed immediately. I’ve got to get out there with my fogger!
I think the Liberty model is $495 at Home Depot, but not sure. Sam’s Club sells Rhino SkeeterVac for considerably less and I’ve read good reviews of it recently. However, it looks like the SkeeterVac uses a tank of propane every two weeks which would raise your operating costs considerably. The SkeeterVac is cordless, relying only on the propane to operate, so that convenience might make up for the added operating cost. The Mosquito Magnet(requires 110VAC, comes with a 50’ cord) website says that a tank will last 21 days. I’ve found that if I buy or swap for a prefilled tank that’s about right, but if I have my tank refilled at a bulk propane tank it lasts for about a month. Apparently there’s a difference in the amount of propane I’m getting when I have it refilled vs swapping out… Generally refills are cheaper too around here. Other accessories such as attractants, replacement nets, etc. are expensive from either manufacturer.
The mosquitoes are about as bad right now as I’ve ever seen them anywhere, and the asian tiger is the primary enemy. I’m emptying the net on my machine every two days and generally have a big double-handfull (heaping cereal bowl) of mosquitoes in the net. You’ll need some replacement nets so that you can pull the drawstring to hold the live ones in until they die when you remove the net and replace with a fresh one. After all have died in the removed net I empty them out and rinse the net for future use. The nets will deteriorate and tear; I think I replaced three last season, at about $7 each.
After saying all that, I’m considering a Rhino SkeeterVac because of the price and cordless feature to increase my comfort zone. I don’t mind buying the propane if it works, but at this point I would like to have more information on this machine. I’m certainly not going to pay the price for a cordless Mosquito Magnet but if the SkeeterVac works nearly as well for under $300 (with significantly greater operating cost) I’ll have one.
