Tag Archives: diy

Wine bottle drip irrigator

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Instructions for making a drip irrigator out of a wine bottle. In case you’re bored out of your mind during the Covid-19 lockdown.

Wine bottle drip irrigator

Instructions

  1. Cut the bottom off the bottle. The above shows a 750-mL bottle but a 1.5-L works, too. I own a Creator’s bottle cutter kit (it’s fantastic) but there are videos showing other techniques.
  2. Drill a hole through the cork to accommodate 1/4″ tubing.
  3. Cut a length of 1/4″ drip irrigation tubing so that it is 1/2″ longer than the cork. Put a small piece of tape over the opening of one end.
  4. Put a few drops of outdoor glue into the hole. Gorilla Glue is nice because it tends to expand, filling gaps in the cork.
  5. Insert the taped-up end of tubing into hole, pushing until untaped part is flush. Take off tape (that was there to make sure it didn’t get filled with glue).
  6. Once glue is dry, insert cork into bottle so that the 1/2″ overhang is sticking out.
  7. Attach an adjustable valve to the tubing.
  8. Attach a 12″ (or so) length of 1/4″ tubing to the valve.
  9. Attach bottle to a 36″ stake (1×1″ wood, 1/2″ bamboo, or plastic-coated metal) using wire. Make it extremely snug so that when filled with water it won’t drift down.
  10. Crumple up some tulle (or flexible screening) to form a filter plug near cork. Tamp down using a long rod. This prevents hole and valve from clogging.
  11. Attach tulle (or flexible screening) to top with two rubbers bands. One rubber band is fine but the second is backup in case sunlight degrades one. The screening keeps out debris, but also prevents mosquitoes from ovipositing when valve is closed (and bottle is filled).

Here are some closeups:

  • Screening on top of bottle drip irrigator device

Once done, situate the irrigator in your garden so that you can easily see the drip and adjust the valve without fighting foliage or stooping. This is why the instructions above call for a short length of tubing rather than something that fully extends into the soil near the plant (where you couldn’t see it). Evaporation from a falling drop of water is probably non-zero but I think the ability to see the drip rate is worth it.

When you water drop by drop, slowly, the soil has time to fully absorb the moisture. Drip irrigated plants thus need far less water, sometimes dramatically less. Another benefit is that water isn’t constantly splashed onto leaves, something that can distribute as well as activate pathogens. Some plants simply don’t like wet leaves (don’t judge). And many plants (such as tomatoes) also benefit from being constantly hydrated, something that is hard to accomplish with normal irrigation. Finally, plants tend to take up fertilizer better when it is slowly delivered.

Indoor mosquito trap made from plastic soda bottle

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Here are instructions for building a mosquito trap using a 2-liter plastic soda bottle. All you do is add some bait (honey, fruit, juice, sugar water, or some nectar-containing flowers) and place in a dark corner of the room. It works because mosquitoes seek out sugar, which they require to fuel themselves. Once inside the bottle they can’t get out.

DIY plastic bottle mosquito trap
Printable version

The above instructions are a modification of a Taiwanese science-fair project that eventually went viral. The differences between the original instructions and mine are that (1) I don’t recommend adding dry active yeast, (2) I suggest sugar sources other than granulated sugar, and (3) I don’t wrap trap in black paper. The omission of yeast is because I don’t think the generation of carbon dioxide is necessary to attract mosquitoes to sugar. In fact, adding yeast likely reduces the attractiveness and causes the trap to fail faster.

The critical part of the original instructions is to deploy the device on the floor in a corner of a room. This is because mosquitoes love to hang out in corners — they are dark and relatively free of desiccating drafts.

Why it works

Mosquitoes are famous for sucking blood, but like many insects they spend most of their lives quietly ingesting sugar from flowers and rotting fruit. For example, here are some mosquitoes nectaring in the middle of the day:

Psorophora ferox
Aedes albopictus (Asian tiger mosquito) nectaring on swamp milkweed
Aedes albopictus

So when mosquitoes find themselves trapped inside, they will zero in on whatever you have on the countertops — fruit, puddles of syrup, cut flowers, or even a dirty sponge. I don’t have photographs of mosquitoes eating fruit inside but Justin Yoshida (Thailand) does: on jackfruit, on apple slices, and on eggplant. Mosquitoes indoors are likely not especially picky about fruit type because the option is starving to death. Mosquitoes even fall into juice containers and die, apparently, as one restaurant discovered. And here’s a mosquito eating brioche goop at my house:

Asian tiger mosquito

In case you’re skeptical that these traps can actually work, here’s a video by somebody who followed the original (science fair) directions and killed 9-10 mosquitoes in 24 hours:

Tips

  1. The original instructions suggest 50 g (~1/2 cup) sugar and 200 mL (~1 cup) water but the ratio probably doesn’t matter at all. Brown sugar is likely better than granulated (white) sugar because it has more impurities (some of which are volatile). A drop of rose water might make the sugar mixture more attractive.
  2. Make traps with different types of bait to see which ones are most attractive to the species that are local. Anopheles coluzzii, for example, seems to prefer papaya and banana juice over mango juice (Nignan et al. 2020). Other species might prefer oranges. Or, perhaps, durian.
  3. Replace your bait when it stops attracting mosquitoes. Perhaps every four days if you use fruit (Meza et al. 2020).
  4. If you use flowers, opt for ones that have nectar (if you know) and are light-colored. Or stick a small potted orchid inside the bottle — their blooms last for weeks.
  5. If you happen to have a plant with extrafloral nectaries, that’s a great bait that will likely last for a long time (when you’re on vacation, for example). Try a bunch of wild cherry leaves, for example.

Why it won’t work outside

Don’t bother using these traps outside (the recommendation of the viral versions). Mosquitoes prefer natural sources of sugar so they will likely ignore anything inside a container. The traps will also not work in rooms full of flowering plants or decomposing fruit. Similarly, if your kids spill juice and soda everywhere, the traps won’t work.

Adding toxins to the mix

If you have a house free of small kids and meddlesome pets, you can add bit of boric acid to the solution to create an attractive toxic sugar bait (ATSB) station. Then, when mosquitoes ingest the fluid they will die even if they manage to escape the trap (it can happen). In fact, once you have a toxin in the fluid you can and should just get rid of the funnel part of the trap — its presence is likely a barrier to some mosquitoes even though it’s relatively wide (~2 cm). Instead, cut a 3 cm hole in the side and keep the cap on the bottle. Note that because these devices are indoors you don’t need to worry about the boric acid (or whatever) poisoning the pollinators in your yard.

The above is nicely explained by Andy Lee Graham:

Anne Barone writes that blackberry wine pairs well with boric acid.

Note that fermentation will occur even though you haven’t added any yeast. Fungal spores are present everywhere.

Commercial, outdoor versions that contain yeast

In the United States the following “yeast and sugar” products are advertised to kill mosquitoes outside: the Spartan Mosquito Eradicator, the Spartan Mosquito Pro Tech, the Sock-It Skeeter, the Donaldson Farms Mosquito Eliminator, the Mosquito XT, the Aion Mosquito Barrier, the Skeeter Hawk Backyard Bait Station, Grandpa Gus’s Mosquito Dynamiter, Tougher Than Tom’s Mosquito TNT, and the Solution X. I’ve reviewed them all here (they don’t work).

© 2021 COLIN PURRINGTON