Mosquito Zapper with Schematic and Comparison to other Zappers

Added: 2026-06-05

[00:00:00]Hey, hey. It's that time of year to get out the bug zappers. But unfortunately, I already got stung before I even got the package open. Uh, tell me in the comments if uh your government is as bad as ours. Okay, this was on sale. $4.97.

[00:00:22]Oh, but we have to also pay $1.35 environmental fee. It's not a tax uh though you have to pay it.

[00:00:34]So, okay, but we have to pay it anyhow.

[00:00:39]Now, then we have uh GST, which is our federal uh vampires. Then we have the PST, which is our provincial uh vampires.

[00:00:52]Um the ones at 5%, the ones at 7%.

[00:00:56]So, let's see what this works out to be.

[00:01:00]For the $4.97 item, which if I had bought off of um AliExpress, uh I wouldn't be paying the PST, the GST, or the environmental fee. So, this is definitely designed to hurt um local stores. So, let's see. Uh the tax on that item is uh 25 cents plus 35 cents.

[00:01:27]The tax on the fee which is considered a service or disservice is uh 79.

[00:01:38]So, in total, I spent $2.11 on government fees uh for a $4.97 item.

[00:01:53]Oh, so there's only 42% uh fees on this item. Yeah, I got stung.

[00:02:03]Well, enough whining. Time to open it up and uh take a look at look at what we have here.

[00:02:13]And it apparently needs uh two AA batteries.

[00:02:21]So, let's just first off find out if it works. Oh, there we go.

[00:02:32]I believe these ones are good.

[00:02:41]Slap it in there.

[00:02:44]Okay. Force it in there.

[00:02:52]Now, oh, a little light does come on.

[00:02:59]Now, let's see if it uh makes a nice zap.

[00:03:11]Well, zaps quite nicely.

[00:03:14]Now, let's see if it's got a bleeder resistor on it. Okay, I've got it pushed down. It's definitely on.

[00:03:24]Ah, you got to be joking.

[00:03:28]Okay, charge it up. We'll give it a tiny bit longer. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

[00:03:39]Oh, it did discharge. Okay, let's make sure the batteries are good in there.

[00:03:48]Oh, I don't think it actually was charged up. That's much brighter. Okay, let's give it a few seconds.

[00:03:58]And did it discharge?

[00:04:02]No, it didn't fully discharge.

[00:04:09]Okay. If it does have a bleeder resistor, it's uh probably too high of a value. Let's just do it one more time.

[00:04:21]One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10.

[00:04:28]Okay.

[00:04:32]Uh, let's open this thing up and find out what's inside it.

[00:04:45]I think I need to level my table.

[00:04:49]Okay, it's got uh five screws.

[00:04:54]Oh. Uh yeah, let's just double check.

[00:04:58]Yep, five screws that type.

[00:05:06]There's one.

[00:05:14]Okay, they're all the same size.

[00:05:18]And here's another one.

[00:05:23]And there's the last one hopefully.

[00:05:29]Okay, I might need to maybe not. Okay, there we go.

[00:05:40]Let's just turn it around for ease.

[00:05:44]Okay, you got one wire going to the top, one wire going to the bottom, and the one that should be hot is in the middle.

[00:05:55]Let's just pull this up.

[00:05:59]Okay, just taking a quick look at it.

[00:06:10]Don't see any screws.

[00:06:13]I suspect it's just a pressure fit then using the battery uh terminals. Yep.

[00:06:23]And there's a little switch.

[00:06:29]Definitely. Oh god. Uh this uh reminds me of that other one. I'm going to zoom down.

[00:06:37]Okay, they saved uh less than a penny.

[00:06:46]They've got the holes for the resistor.

[00:06:50]Wait a second. Oh, nope. They did put a resistor in.

[00:07:00]So, why wasn't it bleeding down?

[00:07:03]Let me just check the value of that resistor.

[00:07:07]So, it does have a bleeder resistor. It is red, red, green, uh, which is 2.2 meg. I just didn't wait long enough for it to, uh, discharge it. So, what I'm going to do next is I'll do up a schematic of this.

[00:07:27]Let's see.

[00:07:31]Not a lot of parts on this one.

[00:07:34]uh you're dealing with two resistors, three resistors, one diode, and one transistor.

[00:07:44]And of course, the part that's doing most of the magic in here is this transistor and the coils here.

[00:07:54]So, yes, give me a few minutes.

[00:07:58]Well, I'm going to need to pull off this transistor.

[00:08:02]And uh it says it's a D882, but uh I'm not totally sure on that. If it's a D882, it's uh NPN, but I've got the tools, so I might as well take it off and uh stick it in the tester.

[00:08:37]Oh, that came out quite nicely.

[00:08:42]Uh, where's my tester? There it is.

[00:08:50]Okay.

[00:08:57]Oops. Let's get this. Oh, I never pulled this off.

[00:09:04]Test.

[00:09:11]And it is a npn.

[00:09:19]Okay.

[00:09:21]Was my guess right?

[00:09:24]One, two, and three.

[00:09:28]Okay. Guessed right.

[00:09:32]So now I'll finish the schematic.

[00:09:35]Now, I'll finish the schematic after I put this back on. Boy, there's a lot of uh flux on this thing.

[00:09:47]Okay, that came out pretty good.

[00:09:55]Now, uh here's some really good uh quality control. If you can see that uh wire there that was leaning over and onto here. I think I'll trim that off also.

[00:10:21]There we go.

[00:10:23]Make it a bit better.

[00:10:26]And some solder.

[00:10:42]hold still.

[00:10:53]And that looks like if it stayed in focus.

[00:11:00]That's good.

[00:11:04]Schematic time and bonus schematics since I've done several other of these.

[00:11:10]Here's my first shot at it. And uh it's a mess, of course, but uh here's a much prettier view of it.

[00:11:21]Uh so you have the power switch. The resistor to the LED is a 330 ohm orange orange brown. Then you have the resistor going to the feedback uh then to the transistor uh which is a brown, black, red 1k.

[00:11:43]Uh the feedback is less than 2 ohms and it's going to pin three which is that one.

[00:11:55]Uh then uh up here you've got uh there's a transformer there. I just put an arbitrary ABC. Uh you got the primary going to the collector and then down to the emitter.

[00:12:16]Uh it's also less than 2 ohms. Uh originally when I looked at it, I forgot to take uh leads into account. Uh over here on the secondary, it's 109 ohms.

[00:12:29]And uh I'll be showing what the other circuits look like. This is super minimal. You've got a diode, you've got a resistor, 2.2 meg. Uh then you've got the big capacitor and you got the two going off to the upper and the lower mesh. And then this one here goes off to the middle mesh.

[00:12:55]Now, how does that differ from some other ones?

[00:13:01]This one here, which I did a while back, uh same type of idea. They've got these reversed and they've got these uh this reversed. They've got it down here instead of up here. And Ditto, this is up here, not down there. Uh then it came across to the secondary. And they had one, two, three diodes and one, two, three, four capacitors including the big E. And theirs was rated for 2 kilovolts.

[00:13:35]Whereas this one is rated for uh 630 volts. H um then the rest is the same. Now I did another one a while back.

[00:13:51]Uh same idea LED. This one there they had the coil resistor then the transistor.

[00:14:01]Uh this one had one, two, three, four diodes. One, two, three, four, five capacitors.

[00:14:10]Uh a 2.2 uh mega ohm uh bleeder. I think it's 2.2 or could be 22. Probably 2.2 though. And then they had the output to the zapper part, the meshes. So, uh, these people went super cheap, but it does work. Uh, it's just not exactly too efficient.

[00:14:42]So, that's it for this one. Uh, it'll be used on many, many bugs and I'll put it back together. But at least they did have the bleeder resistor here.

[00:14:56]Oh, and just to verify, uh, the upper and the lower here goes to this side, which goes to this end of the diode. So, they're there, and there's a diode coming out to the big pad here. So, yeah, absolute minimum number of parts.

[00:15:17]That's probably why they were able to sell this at a super discount, uh, $4.95. They wanted to get rid of them.

[00:15:26]At least it's nicely shaped like a mosquito there. Oh, have a good one. And swat them with lots of vigor. Bye.

[00:15:37]So, how's it going, Spidey?

[00:15:40]Uh, looks like you're going to get evicted outside.

[00:15:46]Yeah, you're pretty nicel looking, but if I don't toss you out the door, the misses will take you outside around the block and then toss you out of the cup.

[00:16:04]This way, at least you probably can find your way back here.