Ridge Ryder Zapper and Lantern Review

When you can’t turn your laptop or phone screen on without getting peppered by little bugs and mosquitos inside your Hybrid Caravan, you know there’s a major problem, and we faced exactly this not long after arriving in Queensland. The warm, humid weather breeds little bugs by the millions, and after one night, I was fairly thoroughly fed up.

Knowing that there wasn’t much else we could do to stop these critters (they seem to get through our windows, which we can’t shut as its too hot inside otherwise), I decided to destroy as many of them inside our camper trailer, and went on the hunt for a camping bug zapper. Bunnings was the first stop, but everything they had was either mega expensive (Ryobi zapper!), huge, or very heavy, and I didn’t want anything like that.

The Ridge Ryder Bug Zapper and Lantern appeared on my radar pretty quickly next, and the local store confirmed that they had a couple in stock, so I headed over. In actual fact, we had something similar from Snowys (except it had little tablets in the top to attract the bugs), and I loved it, but the charging port became very dicky, and it didn’t make the cull for our lap around the country. Who knew Queensland would change that?!

After a quick look at the reviews, and the packaging, I picked up two of these; one for my folks, who were also getting hammered by little bugs in their van, and one for us. That night, I set it up, gleefully waiting for the zapping of little bugs to occur.

How does it perform?

This thing works, but it doesn’t seem to attract the bugs very well. Sure, if they fly in there they get sent to their next life, but if its pitch black, and there are hundreds of little bugs in the camper I can turn it on, and they don’t flock to it, like you’d hope. 

That said, my folks one seems to kill a lot more bugs, and we never got around to doing a side by side comparison. Their van certainly seems to let more bugs in, and it killed a lot more too.

EDIT – I’m sure ours doesn’t zap the bugs properly anyway, and now, after less than 6 months only half of the zapper part is lighting up. I’m going to say avoid, based on this alone.

The lights are epic

What really blew my mind though, was the LED lights. It’s got a nice white lamp for a gentle light, but the LED in the centre that you can use as a torch is insanely bright. I’ve got a really decent (eBay Head Torch), and this thing easily competes, which I was shocked about.

It’s probably not what you’d buy it for, but it has come in handy at times, and its seriously bright.

How long does the battery last?

If you were just using the zapper, you’d easily get a number of nights with it on for a few hours each day. If you use the bright centre light, it gets flat really quickly, and even the lantern dims after a few days of playing cards each night. It takes a while to charge from USB too, but so far, we’re really happy with it as a light, but not as a zapper.

I will look at replacing our door fly wire with finer mesh (midgy proof options), and hopefully that reduces the number of bugs entering too!

Do you use a bug zapper in your caravan or camper? Does it work well?

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