Few things are more satisfying during a Summer night than hearing the crackle and pop of another mosquito hurling itself against a bug zapper and knowing that it won’t be trying to suck your blood any more. The only problem with those bug zappers, whether the mounted or hand-held type is that you cannot get every single attacking mosquito. Unless you were to put the bug zapper on yourself, of course. This is basically what [Dani Cruster] of the aptly named ‘DiWHY’ channel decided would be the right course of action.
The video is apparently dubbed over from the original Russian – with the team claimed to be based in Moldova – which probably explains a lot of the reasoning behind this engineering. At the core of the whole-body bug zapper is galvanized mesh, with a big question being how close you can get it to the body before said body gets zapped too. With about a millimeter of clearance between both layers of mesh required at 1 kV, this was another design consideration.
Ultimately the guts of stun guns were used, which output around 10 kV and thus require a 1 cm gap between the mesh layers. PVC plates were used to create the structural elements of the walking bug zapper suit, using a heatgun to form it into a body-appropriate shape. That’s when human testing started, to try and not make it zap the wearer.
The final suit of bug zapping armor uses six stun gun modules, each powered by a 3 V power source created from two 1.5 V alkaline cells that are good for an hour of zapping. One issue found during a human trial run was that the zip ties used turned out to actually cause arcing, which had to be addressed first before heading to the mosquito-infested woods. In the video these are said to be near Tarkov in what appears to be the national park in Russia’s Tver Oblast and clearly a prime mosquito breeding ground.
During the real-life test run many mosquitoes and apparently even some ticks find their electrifying demise, before for some reason they seem to clear out after an hour or so. Overall it seems to work well, even if it’s not that ergonomic and things get spicy when it starts to rain.
