Electric fly killers

Rotor

Has anyone got experience of using this type of thing. http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=140397357770&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT

Have got an annoying fly problem and have tried fly papers and while it caught quite a few it was not before they had landed everywhere else first.
Do these attract flies well or do they rely on the fly randomly landing on them ?
Good price?
Any advice appreciated

sillygoose

They do work, restaurants and commercial kitchens depend on them. Obviously they work better at night and with less distracting sources of light the better. As some insects fly in and get shocked they seem to be able to bounce out a bit so you can get a pile of corpses around the appliance.

There are a lot of rubbish ones around due to the greeny-eco-police insisting everything uses no electricity so many of these have been downgraded to 3-5Watts which is USELESS! I use a 20 Watt one which works well.

The one you linked should be great although not very attractive. Tip - From Homebase you can buy (£10) a plug in dusk to dawn adaptor that makes these appliance automatic - switching it on when it gets dark and off when light.

The 'crack' noise they make now and then is satisfying as you know it means another one has bit the bullet.

dander

I bought a cheapy one from Robert Dyas last year, but I haven't managed to kill any flies with it. The main problem I have had is that it's on a very short length of cable - the instructions say it should be hung at least 6ft up, but to do that I'd need to attach it to an extension lead and I don't have any kind of hooks at that height to hang it from.

The one you link to looks like a serious industrial one though and those should work brilliantly. When I was a child we spent many happy evenings in a boarding school kitchen watching flies dying. Great noise! (This was before computer games - we had to make our own entertainment in those days!)

sharkie

that step-up transformer needs a bit of voltage and current to shock (or burn the wings off in some cases). Professional ones work on about 3000v rather than 600v

Put some poison in the tray too as it is better than a slow death.

The many of the cheap cylindrical ones similar to the one below only use a voltage doubler circuit and just does not deliver current compared to a transformer http://www.airandwatercentre.com/images/products/Ultrabug.gif

TOTALLY_DISILLUSIONED

Yesterday (23rd. June) I set up a "FLY-ZAP16" which for the 20 mins. it was on, worked very well.While it was running the dog had periods of barking. We thought it was possibly the noise of things dying.When we went back into the room, where the machine was, the dog could not leave the room quick enough. It even went outside and lay on the concrete some way away from the house. And it has never done that before.We can only assume that the dog is hearing a noise that we can't hear and it's upsetting the dog.We can't find any reference to this problem on the Internet but it may exist.I do not blame the fly killer machine as perhaps all machines emit the noise. Perhaps we are unlucky in the dog we have.If you have a dog it perhaps would be better to borrow an electronic fly killer to see if it works, without any problems, and buy one of those, if it's o. k.

keith969

It probably uses an electronic inverter to step up the voltage, and is probably running at 20KHz or so just out of the range of human hearing - but dogs can hear higher frequencies so a horrid loud noise to the dog!

sillygoose

How high was it? could the dog have poked his nose in and go it zapped? should think that would make him want to get away from it!

heygringo

Do these zappers only work at night? We find the most aggro comes from these pesky blighters during the day, as they zoom in & out of the rooms like kamakazi warriors.