6 days ago
Fly Fans Won't Keep Bugs From Crashing Your Barbecue. But Here's What You Can Do.
If these fans do work, the radius for efficacy is extremely limited. While dining outdoors with a Fly Fan, my colleague Rose Maura Lorre saw a fly land on the corner of a pack of hot dog buns. She got out a tape measure and found that the distance between the outer edge of the fan's blades and the fly's location was about 8 or 9 inches. Rose Maura Lorre/NYT Wirecutter
Wirecutter bought a set of four fans for $49.99, a not-insignificant amount of money. I used the fly fans during some lake-adjacent dining with my colleague Rose Maura Lorre, and then I left two fans with her to continue testing.
We found that even though the area directly under the fan's blades might be fly-free, you need to set up too many of them to make a difference across a table that seats six people. In fact, based on my experience, you'd probably want at least eight of these fans for a family of four.
'If I'm serving a family-style meal, the table top will already be crowded with plates, glasses and dishware,' Rose said. 'Adding three or four Fly Away fans to that clutter, with everyone passing dishes or reaching for condiments, I just think it could turn comical really fast.' Rose went so far as to measure the distance between the edge of the fan blade and the spot where she saw an offending critter alight on her table; it was about 8.5 inches.
These fans have several positive aspects: They're quiet and portable, and they don't use chemical pest control. But all two of the bug researchers I contacted were dubious about the efficacy of fly fans.
The theory is that a fly fan disrupts the visual and olfactory senses of flies, and that prevents them from wanting to land on the delicious-smelling food. But this may be only a temporary blocker, Michael 'Fly Man' Dickinson, who researches how flies fly at CalTech, said in a video interview.
The air movement generated by the fly fan isn't fast enough to throw them off-course. 'Flies are attracted to food,' Changlu Wang, whose research at Rutgers University focuses on developing urban pest-management technologies, explained in an email. 'It is hard to prevent them [from] coming when you have attractive food around.'
Even if the flies are initially deterred, their motivation to access the yummies is likely stronger than the spinning obstacle. And when flies do manage to land on your burger, the slowly circulating blades may actually stop them from taking off again. 'Flies can only fly so fast, so if they know there's going to be headwinds that they can't deal with, they won't take off,' Dickinson explained.
The experts I consulted aren't aware of a peer-reviewed scientific study that verifies a fly fan's efficacy, and my observed results were anecdotal.
