Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 6-10 of 143
 The real deal review! June 23, 2005
Noel C. Stanhope (Merritt Island Florida)
37 out of 40 found this review helpful
Ok here goes the "Real Deal"....I bought this item about three months ago and purposely waited to write a review. Mainly because the previous reviews are mixed and you may not get a good feel whether or not to buy one.
I knew I had to buy it mainly because my daughter has a bad reaction to the little boogers biting her and $400 was a small price to pay when you consider how much time and money I was spending on ER visits.
We live in Florida on a barrier island and as you can imagine have very many of those pesky buzzards flying around looking around for a place to eat. We put our trap in the back yard because it's the closest to the woodsy area, we have an empty lot behind us full of vegetation. After two weeks very few mosquitoes were caught, very disappointing actually when you consider the back yard is where I dare not travel unprotected! But alas, I was bound and determined not to give up, did some more reading and made sure I had the right mosquitoes in our area for the attractant we were using and tried to move the unit to the front of the house were it is a little more open. I figured maybe the breeze could help and positioned it to where the fumes would be blown across my yard and entrance. Success! I'm now catching them like crazy! I would say when I change out the attractant and propane the basket is about 1/4 to 1/3 full of dead mosquitos.
Lessons learned:
1. Don't let the whiners who are bothered by the fact you have to refill the propane tank or put in new attractants and occasionally purge the system with the c02 cartridges bother you when deciding to purchase. Look, you don't get something for free nowadays, the idea of buying something and then being able to walk away with no upkeep is ludicrous.
2. I should have made the effort to get the bigger model, I live on a 1/3 of an acre but I think the bigger model would have made more of an impact on the mosquito population.
3. ***Most important**** Give the unit time to establish the area before judging its performance. Another words, let it stay in one spot before moving it to see if it's the right place to leave it.
I hope this helps a lot of you in deciding, nothing is the fix-all, but honestly if I can make a dent in the reproductive system of the mosquitoes and keep them at bay most of the time I'll be happy. Twenty or so dollars every 21 days is a very small price to pay when you are faced with being a prisoner in your own house. Kids tend to go stir crazy a lot faster than adults!
Cheers, Chris
 mosquito magnet defender July 6, 2003
36 out of 42 found this review helpful
This thing really works, it caught about 50 mosquitos and 150 no see ums in the 1st day.I had a lentek eco trap which only caught 2 mosquitos in about 6 days-sent it back.
Works Well May 29, 2004
33 out of 34 found this review helpful
I bought 2 of the 1/2 acre defenders. One I put out back in the woods. That one is catching to beat the band. After one week we sit out on the pool deck at night and no mosquitos at all. I have bushes along the back of the yard and when I watered them I was getting bitten alive. After 2 days of the magnet running only 1 mosquito tried to bite me when watering the bushes. The magnet out front is a different story. It only has caught 3 so far and we are still getting bitten when sitting on the front porch or playing basket ball in the driveway. I think I have it too close to us. I am going to try moving it to the side yard and see what that does. One catches hundreds and works great, the other seems to do nothing. Go figure. At least I can sit out in the back yard after 5pm and not feel lilght headed from donating blood.
Patience, and then calm in the yard! August 7, 2003
32 out of 33 found this review helpful
Mosquito Magnet really does work -- it just takes some patience on the part of the buyer, and an understanding of mosquito reproduction cycles (already detailed in other customers' comments). When the mosquito season was revving up in June, my poor retriever got bit all up and down his back and even his tail, and became really sick from an allergic reaction to all the bites, which became horribly infected. I thought it was some awful disease, but the vet said it was mosquito bites!! I had to give him an antibiotic for ten days, and oatmeal shampoo baths to help him get better, and I was afraid to let him out for more than a few minutes because that's about how long it was taking the mosquitoes to locate him and attack. It was the same for me. I got so many bites I felt like a pincushion and even got a bad headache and slight fever for several days. Moquitoes were hanging out around the doors waiting to get in, and I felt trapped in my own house. That's when I went to Home Depot to get a "zapper," and a nice fellow who works there mentioned the Mosquito Magnet. They were sold out in almost every place that had them, but I finally located one in a Home Depot north of here, and set it up. It started catching mosquitoes right away, and I was getting one or two dozen every day. It's hard to count them, because they simply dehydrate and shrink inside the trap and look like little bits of dust with wiry legs after they dry up. By the end of the first week one side of the net was covered with them, and by the third week, my neighbor said she had noticed a decline in the mosquito population in her yard, as well. I don't really think you can measure the quality of this item by the number of mosquitoes killed -- you can only judge it in terms of whether or not you keep on getting bit. But the real benefit was after the fourth week, I was finally able to go out on my deck in back and enjoy rereshments with friends in the moonlight and throw balls for my dog without being attacked by mosquitoes. It was perfectly quiet, at last, no mosquito whine any more. I have neighbors with a forest in back of their house on one side of me, and neighbors with an enormous garden and small pond on the other side, so I was getting them from all directions. I placed the trap first on one side of the backyard, and then on the other. It only costs a few dollars a week to operate the thing, which I think is worth it, unless you like wearing DEET all over you every time you go outside, and then you still have to listen to mosquitoes buzzing all around you. I have to agree, though, with one of the other customers who wrote on here about the written instructions not being very clear. The diagrams need to show more detail and list every feature so that technologically challenged persons can figure out how to set it up and keep it going. Not all users are guys -- some of us are dumb blondes, but we pay big bucks for this thing, and we ought to get adequate instructions. I also don't like the idea of the long wait on the telephone for help, and I think the company would keep more customers if they hired a couple more people to do the telephone patrol and keep buyers happy with this expensive product. It does work, though!
 The 18 month wonder May 15, 2006
William G. Tepsick Sr. (el paso, tx)
31 out of 31 found this review helpful
The first time I tried to clear the unit I had a l-shaped adapter. Damn thing blew apart. Low and behold, they had a different design, now. The unit worked ok for abot a year and one-half, then I started getting the famous error light flashing. I cleared it four times w/co2, got a new tank of popane, reset the regulator. The whole nine yards, but nothing worked. When I called tech support, all they could say was that it was an internal problem and to send it back at my cost and they would send me another at $130 = 19.95 shipping again. Then I said that's not bad for a new unit, to which she replied that it was refurbished. I asked why the could not send me the internal parts. Can't do it. Hey, what a deal. I passed on this golden opportunity. Maybe someone else makes amore reliable unit that does the same function.
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