MoskiCell

It is the last hour of light, the plate is still warm, everyone has a drink and nobody wants to move. Then one person slaps an arm. Then another. Twenty minutes later the chairs are empty, everyone's inside behind the flyscreen, and the evening you'd been looking forward to has been called early by something that weighs two milligrams.

MoskiCell exists for that hour. It is a rechargeable repeller roughly the size of a slim power bank, and it works by heating a solid repellent tablet rather than pushing anything through a nozzle. You slide a tablet into the slot, press the button, and the vapour spreads into the air around the unit while you get on with whatever you were doing. Ten minutes later the difference is obvious enough that nobody comments on it, which is rather the point.

What people notice first is everything that doesn't happen. Nothing goes on your arms. Nothing goes on the kids before dinner. Nothing soaks into a shirt, and your hands don't smell like the inside of a bait shop for the rest of the night. There is no gas cartridge to hunt down at the servo, no citronella smoke drifting across the table, and no half-empty aerosol slowly leaking into the door pocket of the ute.

The box is short to describe: the unit, and six repellent tablets. That is enough to be useful the evening it lands rather than after a second order. It charges over Type-C from the same lead as your phone, the battery is good for up to 14 hours, and the only thing you ever replace is the tablet.

MoskiCell: who is it for?

Anyone whose good weather happens outdoors after sunset. People with a deck or a verandah they quietly stop using in February. Campers and caravanners who are already carrying too much gear and would rather one item did three jobs. Anglers standing near reeds at dusk, which is exactly where and when mosquitoes are at their worst. Parents who would rather not spray a five year old down before the food comes out.

It also earns its keep well outside mozzie season. The torch gets used walking back from the amenities block, finding a tent zip in the dark, or during a blackout when the phone is the only other light in the house. The USB output has brought more than one phone back from flat at a campsite with no power. That's the honest reason these end up living in the car rather than a cupboard: two of the three jobs are useful all year.

How MoskiCell works

Inside the unit is a small heating chamber with a plate on each side of the repellent tablet. Press the button and both plates warm at once. The tablet is solid, not liquid and not pressurised, so nothing is being forced anywhere. The heat simply lifts the repellent off the tablet as a vapour and lets it move into the air around the unit.

That is the entire difference between this and a spray. A spray works because it is on you. A heated tablet works because it is in the air near you, which is why the unit can sit on the table, on the arm of a chair or on the step of the caravan and then be forgotten about. It also explains the ten minute wait, because the vapour needs a few minutes to build before the space around you genuinely feels different.

Then there is the running cost, which is usually what settles the argument. An aerosol gets used up and thrown out. A butane unit needs cartridges you have to remember to buy. A coil or a candle burns down and leaves smoke drifting across the food. Here the unit charges over Type-C from any phone charger, the battery is good for up to 14 hours per charge, and the only consumable is the tablet. Six of those are already in the box.

The real sign it's working is that nobody at the table mentions mosquitoes at all.

Start it before you need it. The single biggest difference between people who rate this and people who don't is when they press the button. Ten minutes of build-up isn't a long wait unless you're already being bitten, at which point it feels like an age. Switch it on when you carry the food out, when you pull the camp chairs off the ute, or when you tie the boat up. By the time everyone has sat down, the work is done.

Put it at the height people sit. This works on the air immediately around the unit, so parked on the ground three metres away it is doing nothing for you. On the table, on the arm of a chair, on the step of the caravan or hanging from the frame of an awning are all better than the far corner of the deck. If the group is spread out, move it to wherever most people are rather than trying to cover the whole yard from one spot.

Read the breeze before you blame the unit. Air moves, and so does vapour. On a still evening the pocket around the unit builds nicely. With a breeze, put it on the windward side of the group so the air carries the vapour across everyone rather than away from them. That one adjustment fixes most of the nights where someone decides it isn't working.

Two tablets near water is not overkill. Still water, wet grass, reeds and thick scrub at dusk are the hardest conditions there are. That is what the second tablet slot is for, and using it is cheaper than the evening being ruined. Save the single tablet for a paved courtyard on a dry night, where it really is all you need.

How to get the most out of every tablet

Charge it the evening before rather than on the way out. Fourteen hours is a generous number, but the torch and the phone charging output draw from the same 4000 mAh cell, so a night where you lean on all three will not stretch as far as a night where you only run the repeller. Treating it like a phone, topped up whenever it is sitting on the bench anyway, means you never find out where the limit is.

Switch it off when you go in. There's no benefit to leaving a tablet cooking in an empty backyard, and the tablet is the part you pay for. The same goes for packing up: let it cool for a minute before it goes into a bag, the same way you would with anything that has been warm.

Keep spare tablets in something sealed and out of the sun. They are a consumable and heat is what activates them, so a sealed bag in the camping box will outlast a loose handful rattling round a hot glovebox all summer.

It's worth being straight about what a heated repeller is and isn't. It works on the air around the unit, so a strong wind pulls that air away faster than the tablets can replace it, and a fully exposed spot on a gusty night is the hardest case for any device of this type. It is not a replacement for a flyscreen or a mosquito net while you are asleep, and it isn't something to leave running unattended indoors. What it is genuinely good at is the pocket of air around a table, a chair or a tent door on a still evening, which is where the overwhelming majority of the biting actually happens.