I’ve been on the island for three weeks now. As I previously noted, I tend to attract more mosquitoes and bites than average, and have a bad reaction to them. I love sitting out on my deck and sipping coffee in the morning, but being that still only works for 5-10 minutes before I’m being attacked. The worst is working up a sweat in semi-enclosed spaces, like wiring my studio, plumbing the outdoor shower, and trimming the prodigious vegetation around the place. In all these cases, the Thermacell does the job. It seems to create an almost complete mosquito-free zone.
The chemical cartridges aren’t cheap: about $18/apiece from Amazon and I have yet to check local prices. They claim you should get 40 hours out of a cartridge. I definitely didn’t from my first one, but it also fell over one time when I was transporting it and some fluid may have leaked out. Overall, 50¢ US an hour for mosquito protection is worth it, though I’m still on the fence about the insecticide exposure.
—2p