Gnat Problem: Not

Quite by mistake I found a way to kill gnats flying around my kitchen.

I was playing around with my cleaning supplies and my wife was complaining about gnats flying around my countertop compost bin. So I made a fly bottle: I took a plastic bottle and cut the top off of it, inverted the top into the body and put some vinegar into it. This worked, it lured some gnats into the bottle and they couldn't escape. I then tossed the bottle and gnats into the garbage bin outside.

But I did something else that worked even better:

Like I said, I decided to play around with the vinegar since I had it out. I poured some vinegar into a flat dish (you could use a cereal bowl), then I poured some sodium percarbonate into the vinegar. Actually what I used was Oxo Brite. I just wanted to watch it bubble up. But then I left it there on the counter. As it turned out, more gnats were captured by these bubbles than by the fly bottle. I guess they were lured in by the smell of the vinegar and then got captured by the bubbles. It turns out that this combination of vinegar/sodium percabonate worked really well to rid out kitchen of gnats.

I later experimented with vinegar and baking soda (sodium bicarbonate), but the bubbles produced disappeared too fast to kill any gnats, so I'm sticking with the Oxo Brite.