Homemade Battery Operated Deer Scent Fans...

During the 2007-2008 Deer Season, I made a conscious decision to use more deer scent during the pre-rut and the rut periods. I am going to discuss two deer scent dispensers later on with their own blog postings that I used but for now I want to talk about a homemade deer scent fan I developed.

While watching TV with my wife, I saw a commercial on TV for this new Oust battery operated scent fan. They cost $8.00 and I immediately had an idea. Why not use this fan to blow out deer scent? The Oust Fan blows scent out in 5 minute increments every 15 minutes and runs off 1 D-size battery and it seemed perfect for this function.


I bought one and quickly took it apart and figured out how to replace the smell good fragrance with the not so great smelling deer urine that you can buy in a bottle. To do this you pull the stem membrane out at the top. Then remove the seal diffuser washer so you can pour your liquid scent into the container. I used a flat head screw driver to remove this washer. Then pour in the scent and put the washer back in the container. The stem member and the washer are visible in the picture below. The hardest thing was removing the overall fragrance smell.

Once that is done then I put the fan in my computer office and ran it for 3 hours with the door shut. When I opened the door I about passed out with the doe urine smell. My wife was not too happy but as from the following picture you can see that the unit sucked up the doe urine. The doe urine is on the left (dark) and a regular fragrance one is on the right.

Now that I proved it worked then I went and bought 2 more of them. I had to figure out a way to keep the fan units from getting wet. I came up with the cheap flower pot method with duck tape in it for support as you can see below.

Now all I had to do is use adjustable straps we use on our trail cameras to fasten the flower pots to a tree. I then proceeded to put it about 6 feet in the air so the deer can not stick their noses directly in it plus the higher the better for the wind to carry it away.

I did place trail cameras in the area around them but unfortunately I did not placed a camera directly in view of the scent fans. I deployed 3 of them for my hunting in Georgia. I did have an encounter while on a deer stand where I watch two does walk up to the fans and smell the scent. They then walked off about 30 yards, smelled, and walked back. To me they were smelling the doe urine and knew it was there but did not see the doe. They acted confused.

One more thing that I learned during the hunting season about my converted scent fan was that they are after all waterproof. I had one blow down during a storm and was exposed to the rain. So from then on I removed the flower pot and mounted them directly to a tree as shown below for maximum performance.

From my experience, the scent fans will last about 3 weeks with doe urine filled all the way to the top and the 1 D-size battery will last for about 9 weeks.

In conclusion I think my scent fan works 10 times better than those Tinks orange containers just because you are actively blowing scent in the air continuously. The only down side to the whole process is filling up the containers with the doe urine. There is something about that smell and when you get on your hand it stays there for a couple of days. I recommend using latex gloves.

Go ahead and try it out and let me know if it works for you or if you have any improvements. If you have any comment or question please email me at techdeerhunter@gmail.com.