Adding one more thing to the list of odd things that have crossed my desk, it is time to start getting rid of those pesky flying bugs that won’t leave you alone, regardless of where you are. The Zapplight is an LED light bulb that contains a built-in bug zapper, allowing you to use it anywhere that allows you to screw in a typical light bulb (E26 type at least). We have seen numerous LED bulb combinations, including WiFi repeaters, speakers and cameras. Bug zappers however, is something new.
I didn’t exactly know how to test something like this since we don’t exactly get a lot of bugs flying around here (thankfully), but the concept seemed pretty great to me. Why has it taken this long to place a bug zapper in typical light bulb?
First off, it is significantly larger than the average bulb. I would say around 75-80% larger to be exact. So you won’t really be able to stick it just anywhere, but most lamps provide more than enough space to compensate for this. You may just find it difficult for certain situations where you may have a really small lantern sconce or something similar. In the image above, you see a perfect scenario for use, where the bulb is hanging.
The light it puts out (upper bulb portion) is about an average soft yellow (2800K, or officially “soft white”), similar to your typical light bulb give or take a color temperature of about 300-400. The box reads 920 lumens, but we didn’t seem to see these results. More around 800-850 at most.
The mid section contains the zapper portion, which is protected by a plastic grid (so you don’t have an accident by grabbing at the bulb). Inside contains the wonderful blue-ish/purple glowing metal cage that is supposed to fry any bug that it attracts into it’s beautiful trap of death (I don’t like bugs, so good riddance).
It uses only around 10-watts of power, so it is comparable to your typical LED bulb, which is amazing. I would have expected that it would require a little more juice. Although, I am sure you might see microspikes in wattage as each bug flies into it.
You also have the option of switching between the light and the zapper portion. Once you have flipped a switch to turn it on, if you turn it off and then back on again (within a short window), only the zapper portion (blue) will be lit. You only have the two options: both sections on, or just the zapper (or both off of course).
Sadly, we never did get a bug to fly into it. We placed it both inside in various locations, one of which had a fly flapping around. The fly vanished, but never went “into the light” at any point. We even placed it outside, overnight a few times, with no results. This means that there was no way of telling if this bulb was working or not, without catching flies and forcing them in…which would seem a little too evil (and I don’t want to play with bugs).
Our Conclusion
As I said, it is a wonderful idea, and I think this should have been developed a long time ago. However, since we couldn’t get any bugs to fly into it (mostly because we didn’t really have much anything flying around to begin with), we couldn’t give it a rating (stalemate?). So for now, we can only get as far as saying that this was a wonderful idea. We’ll see what happens from there (hopefully, it will start zapping insects and taking names eventually). Maybe they can add a small speaker to it in the future so that each time it zaps a bug, it lets out a soft “Groovy!”, Bruce Campbell style!
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