Equipment Notebook: Feb. 1999, Calibrating Your Sprayer

Nozzles. The type of nozzle selected will depend on the area to be sprayed. Flat fan nozzles produce medium-sized droplets in a fan-shaped pattern and are excellent for use on open lawn areas. Hollow or solid cone nozzles spray a rounded pattern and may be more suitable for use along fences or spraying in beds around plants.

Sprayer Selection. You will need to change nozzles for different uses. Never use a sprayer for bed weed control that has been used to spray broadleaf weeds. Even if you wash the sprayer very carefully, trace amounts of broadleaf herbicide remaining in the sprayer, hose or wand can damage ornamental plants. Don’t be tempted to use a vegetation control sprayer for lawn weed control, either. It is best to separate your sprayers by type of use and clearly mark the sprayers.

Calibrating Fan Nozzles. Integrate points 1 through 4 from above when initially calibrating a sprayer. Walk at your normal pace across a lawn area. Establish a comfortable walking speed, which should be about 30 feet in 10 seconds, and make all applications at this pace.

Now, fill the sprayer with 1 gallon of water. If you have a larger capacity backpack sprayer, fill it with 2 gallons of water. Pump the sprayer until the pressure inside the sprayer resists additional pumping. Fifteen to 20 pumps is usually adequate to start.

If all is going well in your calibration process, you are duplicating the action of a tractor-drawn spray rig.

By turning the nozzle so that it is perpendicular to your direction of travel and walking at a constant speed, you will spray the liquid over a certain area. Measure the area sprayed to determine the square feet per gallon.

Most lawn pesticide labels list an application rate in ounces of pesticide concentrate to fill for 1,000 square feet. If the rate is listed for an acre of lawn, divide the ounces per acre by square feet. This calculation determines the “fill rate” for the pesticide.

Calibrating Cone Nozzles. Calibrating sprayers with cone nozzles is not as exact as with flat fan nozzles. For these sprayers, follow the same steps of filling the sprayer with a known amount of water and pressurizing the sprayer. If using the cone nozzle along a fence or driveway, spray the water and measure the area sprayed. (Be sure to walk faster since the spray pattern is more closely spaced than in a cone nozzle in a flat fan nozzle.)

If you cover a pattern 6 inches wide, measure the length of the area sprayed. If you sprayed 1,000 feet with a 6-inch-wide pattern, you sprayed 500 square feet (1,000 feet x 0.5 feet = 500 square feet). If the label indicated you should fill with 1 fluid once of product to be sprayed on 1,000 square feet, you should fill ½ fluid ounce of pesticide in 1 gallon of water.

Use the same general technique as above when trying to calibrate a sprayer equipped with a cone nozzle for use in ornamental beds. Fill the sprayer with 1 gallon of plain water and spray the mulched areas of the bed until the sprayer is empty. Then measure the area sprayed and determine how much coverage 1 gallon of liquid provides.

Calibration is well worth the time because it will improve the results of your spray applications while also making sure you are following pesticide label directions by making appropriate applications, which is a must.

The author is manager, lawn care cmpliance for TruGreen-ChemLawn, Delaware, Ohio.

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