Mosquito Magnet Forum

Anyone have any luck with the Octenol refill kits that are currently available on eBay? These are the kits that use a syringe to inject new octenol into the spent cartridge.

Well to answer myself I just ordered one of these kits and will try it on my next tank change. I'll post a review then...

Update: I received the octenol refill kit. I ordered the four refill kit which cost $15.90 shipped. This kit consists of four vials of octenol, a syringe, and an instruction sheet in a ziplock bag. The liquid octenol is highly concentrated. The instructions state you must wear rubber gloves and eye protection when handling the stuff, and you must only open the vial & refill the cartridge outdoors. This is good advice IMHO. Also, after you open the kit I would recommend storing it in double ziplock bags to contain the odor and to avoid attracting mosquitos to your storage area.

Refilling the cartridge is easy enough. Draw out 2 ml of octenol from the vial and inject half into one hole of the cart and half into the other. When injecting go slowly or the fluid will ooze out of the hole and make a mess. Let the fluid soak into the absorbent material and place in your MM. Each vial contains about 4 ml, so the four-refill kit is more like an eight-refill kit. And, as you'll see, you probably can get sixteen refills from this kit, at which which point it winds up costing a dollar a refill, not a bad deal at all.

IMO the 2 ml dosage is way too high. Unlike the OEM cartridges, I could smell the reloaded octenol from 20 feet away from my MM. Yuck. This lasted a few days. After a few day it's gotten better and now the smell is still pretty strong standing near the MM, but not in the yard where people gather.

Does it work? Hell yea. I'm catching as many if not more mosquitos than with the OEM cartridge, and now I am also catching many, many of the tiny little black things (no-see-ums?) which I never caught before. As I said, a 2 ml dose is probably too much, so next time I'll try 1 ml and see if that works well enough.

Recommended.

-Russ

Thanks for the information, Russ. Once I can get mine up and running again, I will have to give that a shot.

Pete