Every night during summer, we'd be kept awake, and our kids would wake up with welts all over them, and scratching 'till they bled. So I'd sometimes spray the whole upstairs where all the bedrooms are (which is isolated from downstairs by a closed door) with flyspray before everyone went to bed. That would usually give us one night without any mozzie hassles, but they'd usually be back the next night, and sometimes even on the night of the spraying.
A couple of things particularly troubled me about this:
- Our house is newish with good mosquito-proof fly screens on all the windows, and we never leave doors open for longer than it takes to walk through them.
- Upstairs (where all the bedrooms are) has no doors to the outside world, and only one door to downstairs which is generally kept closed and yet we ONLY have mosquito problems upstairs, and NEVER downstairs (even when staying up late watching TV, or whatever).
So where were the blighters coming in??? If coming in via a door, they would have to come in via downstairs, and we would have had problems with them there. If coming in via windows... well, we have the same kinds of windows and flyscreens downstairs as we have upstairs, and so again, I would have expected to have problems with mozzies downstairs too, but that was not the case.
This troubled me for a while, until I really started to take it seriously and brainstorm. They were clearly ONLY getting in upstairs, and NOT downstairs, and they were clearly NOT getting in via doors or windows. So by what means could anything upstairs allow an opening that we don't have downstairs?
Then it dawned on me. There are 2 IXL Tastics upstairs. Hmmm... venting to the outside world.
So I decided to try to install some mosquito mesh on the outside vents. No go. Too high to reach without scaffolding or a cherry picker. I tried an extension ladder but it was only tall enough so that I might just be able to reach the vents if standing on the tippy top rung. Not a safe thing to try, and besides, I seem to be developing a fear of heights in the last couple of years.
So then I took off the panels of the IXL Tastic units themselves, after removing all the globes, and installed mosquito mesh at the inside end of the ducts.
That was about 10 days ago, and we have not had a single mosquito in the house since that moment (I sprayed the house thoroughly immediately after installing the flyscreens so as to get a good test of them).
Still the weather has been a bit odd ever since then, so I'm not absolutely certain, but I'm fairly confident that I've finally beaten the mosquitoes in our house.
I'm pretty excited about it, as you can probably tell, so thought I'd share it here, in case anyone else might be able to benefit from this.
Of course this would apply to all sorts of vents in houses, not just IXL Tastics, but even simple extractor fans, etc. Anything that you're not absolutely certain doesn't have fine flyscreen mesh completely covering it. If your house is otherwise well sealed against mosquitos for the windows and doors, don't forget they could be coming in the vents, exhaust fans, etc.
