How much current to kill an insect?

I live in Scotland. If you don't, you don't know what a mosquito is.

We hunted them with shotguns.

Mine give a nice satisfying 120-hertz-plus-harmonics bzzzaaappp. "Die, mozzie scum!" ;)

They also have mushroom oil (octenol) pads on the bottom.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Yeah, but that's because the chickens weighed 5 milligrams too. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

It is the fact that an arc went through the insect. It does not matter how much juice. ANY amount capable of arcing through the 'flesh' of the insect is enough to 'zap' it. If it is generated, not electrostatic,it is enough. even a static zap kills them if they are part of the path.

John Walliker snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Bug zappers had no caps. They discharged into bugs because bug completed the path for the HV potential which was sitting on the rails. The zap sound is because the bug made a momentary complete circuit for the voltage to arc across the gap... through the bug.

The light in the neon tubes looked better with 60 Hz HV AC, sharper. The RF ones look fake and fuzzy.

Darn, I clean forgot to do that.

A car spark is roughly 50 millijoules per shot. Painful but not deadly.

On a sunny day (Fri, 06 May 2022 15:07:32 -0700) it happened John Larkin <jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote in snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

I have a blue light bug killer, it is just a small voltage multiplier (small value caps) feeding 2 parallel wires about a few mm apart wound around a blue lightbulb. The caps discharge kills the bug (you can short the wires with a screwdriver and see the sparks). The small value of the caps (few hundred nF) limits the current at 50 Hz. Very simple thing, quite effective, was cheap. As usual curiosity had me open it up an look at the circuit. Been working fine for about years.

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** But can you kill a millipede with milliamps ?

..... Phil

Cool ! What kinda spider you got. :-)

They are potentially. But the safety interlocks are quite good to stop humans whilst still allowing flies and insects free access.

A stately home come country house hotel was seriously damaged by an accumulation of dead flies in such a device a couple of years back.

You can smell burning insect it it gets a particularly big moth. UV fluoro light trap and HT bars - looks to me like a neon driver transformer soa couple of mA at a fairly high voltage.

We have them in our VH. Emptying the dead fly trays was moved up the important routine checks list after that fire.

It is the heavier insects that smell the worst and sometimes catch fire. Wings of moths seem to be the most dodgy for that.

I'm waiting for a Scot to invent a small dirigible modelled on a basking shark crossed with a Dyson vacuum. It would patrol up and down hoovering up the midges into a net...

It's called a noble false widow

Not native to the UK but spreading. When they have egg sacs that hatch into armies of spiderlings that is when they get hoovered up...

Wolf spider?

Sure. Try killing a spider with 1J at 1V.

...if the voltage is high enough.

Oh, pretty please. It would be fun to read it.

No. But in season I know where to find Wasp Spiders. But I don't take them home!

I wonder what this is:

We have almost no insects inside. The few spiders eat all the rest.