Shedding a whole new light on LEDs By Your PestWest Team

After visiting dead animals, feces, raw garbage, dumpsters, grease-traps, sewers, floor drains, biofilms, House flies, aka: “flying infections,” enter sensitive facilities and contaminate foods and surfaces through a combined process of extraoral digestive fluids (cyclical regurgitation), defecation, and groom-shedding of bodily particles. House flies contaminate everything from farm to fork and ultimately foods consumed by customers. As a result, filth flies convert restaurants into “pestaurants.” The risks are more intense in the healthcare environment if we see a flying insect in a surgical suite or in pharmaceutical production if there’s contamination caused by flies in sterile environments.

Insect light traps (ILT) exploit the House fly’s neurological mechanism of positive phototactic behavior. Research fact, House flies are most attracted to a wavelength (365 nm) or color of light (UVA). 

Many fluorescent lamp ILTs monitor and control pestiferous, insects as an essential part of an integrated pest management (IPM) program. Significant to pestiferous fly prevention and management is persistent monitoring, detection, and assessment using numerous ILTs and electronic fly killers (EFKs).

A recent insect light trap engineering innovation is the use of electroluminescence or light produced by electrical current flowing through semiconductors or light emitting diodes (LEDs). The benefits of LEDs include electricity converted directly into light, energy efficiency, instant on and off, long operational life, require very little space, and produce a single wavelength or color of light.

Early-generation UVA LED lamp insect light traps use higher-power Surface Mounted Device (SMD) LED strips, restricting light to only 120°. SMD LED lamps emit points, which may both repel flies within the vicinity of the ILTs. Bright points of light intensity do not uniformly interact with the compound eyes of flying insect pests, which can result in less attraction and capture. 

A recent engineering development is the UVA LED filament lamp. UVA LED filament lamp technology involves micro LEDs integrated onto a filament. Filaments are mounted onto a translucent ceramic substrate. This allows UVA LED filament lamps to emit 370 nm or UVA light at a full 360°.

So what does all this mean?

A UVA LED filament lamp system provides significant flying insect capture through uniform emission of UVA light at 360°. UVA LED filament lamps emit a lower light intensity or an inoffensive LUX¹ and high hertz frequency (cycles/second), which uniformly bathes the compound eyes of flying insect pests (avoiding negative phototaxis or repelling).

With superior energy efficiency and 3-year operational life, PestWest has developed the Quantum® X LED filament lamp exclusive for the Mantis® Qualis system. Each Quantum® X lamp contains 432 LEDs. The Mantis® Qualis system contains 2x shatter-resistant Quantum® X lamps or 864 LEDs. With novel LED Quantum X filament technology, PestWest has equaled the attraction of conventional fluorescent lamps.

Developed in combination with the Quantum® X lamp, PestWest has reengineered a unique polymer LED glue board that provides optimum insect capture and hold. Using traditional glue boards common in fluorescent insect light traps will negatively impact flying insect capture.

Through independent testing, the Mantis® Qualis system featuring Quantum X caught an average of 91.2 House flies (out of 100 released) over a 3-hour experimental period. The larger the number of smaller LEDs, the higher the insect capture rate.

Under HACCP, and pest control as a prerequisite program, the MantisÒ Qualis system provides for 24/7/365 monitoring, identification, essential evidence for accurate trends analyses and root cause analyses and supplementary control of House flies and other flying insect pests. 

Ask your Veseris representative about how to get your Qualis and Quantum X for all of your commercial accounts.

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