This is How I Fight Mosquitoes

Ridsect Liquid: The whole gang.

I have long realised that fighting mosquitoes with a sword would be a losing battle; and sending them a strongly-worded letter won't do any good either.

With that in mind, the methods of my choice have been the aerosol spray, the coil burner, and for quite some time now, the electric vaporiser - both paper and liquid.

Plug-and-Play

The one I keep using often is called Ridsect Liquid - the [liquid] plug-and-play version of mosquito repellents. You simply plug it into the wall and… well, you don’t have to play with it, but you can go play and forget about it until it’s morning and you have to turn it off.

It looks like one of those plug-in electric air freshener and relatively unobtrusive. The only thing to remember is that [because it is liquid and the top is not covered to let the vapour out] after removing the protective cap off the bottle, you will have to keep the device upright.

Speaking of vapour, I find that it’s best not to have anything in front to let the vapour roam free so to speak; or as Ridsect's own website suggests: to keep other objects clear for about 60cm.

Also, it takes time for the repellent to heat up before the vapour is released so I turn it on a few minutes before I go to bed. What I think might also help is to have it on a few minutes before you turn on your air conditioner or fan. Obviously, the bigger your room the more of these electric vaporisers you'll need to keep those pesky blood-thirsty insects away; otherwise they'll just wait at the furthest corner and pounce whenever they have the chance to.

If you can see it from the photo below, when you turn on the device, there's a red light that glows continuously that serves as a reminder and turns into a glowy red-eyed monster in the dark... well, you never know.

Ridsect Liquid in action.

Two-Types

From Ridsect's own range, there seems to be two types of refills that I'm aware of and they come in green, named the 'Liquid-P', and red, simply 'Liquid'. There's no information on the difference between the two, but I have tried both and it seems to me Liquid-P gives off some sort of a scent and Liquid doesn’t, at least not as noticeable. Because of its lack of scent, using the red one for the first time was a bit confusing especially it was only my second refill; my first was the green one. I thought it wasn’t working and it had me guessing if I had the bottle screwed on correctly or not. I had to keep checking the liquid to see if it had reduced a bit; and a few days on, it had.

What-I-Like

What I absolutely love about this type of mosquito repellent is that you don’t have to keep changing the refill every day like those electric mosquito repellents that use paper mats. You will only have to think about refills every 30 or 60 nights depending on your refill; and you can see if the liquid is running low since the bottle is transparent.

I still use aerosol sprays to keep off other bugs and bitey stuff, but I keep the liquid vaporiser on when I sleep for extended mosquito protection or protection against mosquitoes actually.

The Ridsect's brand might not be a familiar name to people from outside Malaysia and maybe Singapore; a quick search online proves to be so. But I found similar products by Baygon, sold by sellers in Thailand; and Shieldtox, also from Thailand - none of which I have tried, so I can't comment on them.

One last note, I've always spelled repellent 'repellant' with an 'a'; it seems that 'repellent' with an 'e' is the preferred way of spelling. How do you spell it?