Recharging Centers for Disease Control Light Trap Batteries with Solar Panels

Although Centers for Disease Control (CDC) light traps and other battery-powered traps can be deployed virtually anywhere, one of their principal drawbacks is that the batteries have to be recharged daily. Thus, recharging with a solar panel would render them much less labor-intensive. To that end, a system was designed to connect a solar panel to the battery of a CDC light trap to recharge the battery. There was no significant difference between traps connected to solar panels(solar traps) and traps not connected to solar panels (control traps) in the number of Aedes vexans, Coquillettidia perturbans, Culiseta inornata, and Aedes dorsalis that they collected. Batteries connected to solar panels operated traps significantly longer than batteries without solar panels. Making the operation of traps less labor-intensive would increase the number of traps that can be deployed and/or the number of sites sampled.