Mosquito Magnet attractant holder by SteveWin1

Last crawled date: 3 years, 5 months ago

As you may know, the Lurex3 mosquito attractant was discontinued by Mosquito Magnet. Where I live, this drastically decreased the usefulness of the mosquito magnet (which is fairly expensive). There is no good explanation from the company as to why this happened and there is no explanation as to when they will have something that works as well back on the market. Since they haven't been helpful in supporting their expensive products, which are now basically useless for a large portion of the country, I thought I would try to help myself and the community out by making something that could substitute for the Lurex3. Based on what I could find, it looks like the original Lurex3 canisters had a mixture of 35.4% lactic acid and 64.6% corn starch on the smaller, crescent-shaped side of the canister that has lots of holes, and it had nearly-pure ammonium bicarbonate in the round cylindrical side. When heated, ammonium bicarbonate breaks down into ammonia and CO2, which attracts mosquitoes. These are all food-grade ingredients that are used in cooking and making beer (in the case of lactic acid). I was able to obtain all of these ingredients on Amazon.
Design: This canister is very slightly taller than the original Lurex3 canisters. It has a top that fits into the Mosquito Magnet, which can be printed separately and used separately as a replacement for the plug that keeps the Octenol packets in the mosquito magnet if you don't want to use the full Lurex3 replacement. There is a bottom cylinder that actually holds the attractants, and then a connector that fits over the top and then screws onto the bottom part. These should fit together fairly well and shouldn't require any gluing or adjustment. The screw is backwards, so you screw the bottom CCW to tighten and CW to unscrew it when you want to replace the ingredients. This is to prevent it from loosening when you screw it into the mosquito magnet, but can be confusing when you want to take it apart again and forget that you have to twist the opposite way you twist everything else to unscrew it.
To use: The cylinder has 3 separate compartments. With the canister unscrewed, mix corn starch and lactic acid until it is thick enough not to run (at all) and use a knife to spread this into the crescent-shaped part of the cylinder. Use a funnel or just aim well and fill the round part of the canister with pure ammonium bicarbonate ("Bakers Ammonia"). Push the top into the connector and then screw (backwards) to the bottom part until tight. There is a large-ish hole at the bottom with a small area to place additional attractant, if you wish. I purchased some Nonyl Alcohol (Alcohol C-9) on Amazon ($9) and put some of that in this compartment with a cheap plastic pipette to try to increase my mosquito catch further. Nonyl Alcohol has been shown in several studies to be a fairly strong attractant for mosquitoes, but I'm not sure if it works well in conjunction with the other ingredients (I'll post back after more use). You could also run on a treadmill and collect your own sweat and put it in this compartment, or cut up an un-washed sock that you've worn for a day or more and put some strips of that in there with tweezers (this has also been shown to work well in studies). I plan to play around with the third compartment to see if I can improve upon the recipe that was used in Lurex3, but you could just leave this compartment empty if you want.
Printing: I did the best I could to design this so that it wouldn't need supports, but, unfortunately, the little horizontal tabs that go up into the Mosquito Magnet that actually hold this in there will require supports. So, turn on supports for the top part, but you can leave them off for the connector and the bottom. I would recommend using something fairly heat- and water- resistant, as the MM sits outside where it will get wet and will be in sunlight, plus the MM produces its own heat and blows that heat across this canister. I used PETG and that seems to work well, but I'm sure there are other options. You probably also want to increase the wall thickness since it has to hold liquids. I was originally using black filament, because the bottom part of the MM, where this connects to, is black, but I've since switched to green filament since mosquitoes are somewhat attracted to green (which is why the MM body itself is green).