How to Calibrate Your Sprayer for Accurate Lawn Treatment

This is Will and I'm Hugo from The Lawn IQ and today we're here to help you calibrate your new sprayer. Calibrating your sprayer is a crucial step in ensuring that the products that you purchase from The Lawn IQ are delivered at optimum rates at the right time and you're not wasting any product. This will only take you 10 minutes but it'll ensure that any liquid product that you put in this sprayer is put out at the right rate so you're not wasting any money. The first step is putting a known amount of water in your sprayer. I've put two liters in here, I'll add one more litre because I want to add three liters into the sprayer. Any sprayer you buy will essentially spray at a slightly different water rate and that's because they spray at slightly different pressures and also some sprayers have different nozzles on the end of the lance and so that can also exit the sprayer at a different speed and rate. So we've got three liters in that tank to put the lid on. I'll let it pressurise and this step's crucial. I'm going to add a bit of water back in here to let it get up to pressure. Once you can hear it, emptying all the oxygen, there we go. So now we know we're at pressure because the pump has stopped. The first step is to measure your yard. The yard we're at today is 134m2 On The Lawn IQ website there's a handy tool to help you work out how big your yard is. The second step is to measure a known area within that yard space. What we've done here is measure a five metre by five metre square which totals 25m2 Then we're going to go and spray walking at one metre per second. Once we've applied across the whole 25m2 we'll go and empty the remaining water from our sprayer and measure out how much that is and the three litres we started with minus what's remaining will tell us how much water we have applied across this 25m2 area. So a couple of simple things that can really up your spraying game. Number one is making sure that your spray nozzle is at about knee-height, about 50cm wide every time you spray a swath. And so every linear five metres essentially we're spraying two and a half square metres if we're keeping it at the right height. Number two, keep that walking speed consistent. So we've just done one metre per second. If you really want to be pedantic you can go online and get yourself a metronome and have that playing in the background to keep the pace. And then number three, always start ahead of your run. And what I mean by that is don't just start in your run. If you've got edges and things you can start behind it, start spraying and then walk over it. And so give yourself a nice run through with your spray because that'll allow that consistency of application rate across that whole surface area. So I've just finished applying the sprayer across that 25m2 Now we're going to measure out how much water we have remaining in the tank. One litre. So 1.9L, but obviously because we've been running the sprayer there should be a little bit of water left in the line. So we'll empty that last remaining amount. Not a lot. Always hold your sprayer higher because you do get a bit of head pressure there. There we go. We've run it out. We're exactly 1L So what we measured was two 2L because there's an extra 100ml in here. So we did 1.9L that was remaining in the tank. 100ml in the spray line. So we've essentially filled three litres at the start, gone and applied and then measured out 2L, which means we've applied 1L across that 25m2 area. Walking at 1m/s with the Solo East 206 and this spray nozzle, which means 25m2 is one quarter of 100m2 So we've just applied 4L per 100m2 across our lawn space. So we've got 134m2 lawn here. So we just do 4 X 1.34 which will give us the litres we need to use to make sure that we're applying the right amount of water across this lawn area. I've got to say I'm pretty impressed because I've been doing a lot of trial work using the Solo 206 and that four and that 4L we just got per 100m2 is the same 4L I was getting three years ago with this same sprayer. So it just shows you how accurate and calibrated it actually is and how easy it is if you go down the battery option for spraying. Yeah so The Lawn IQ we have several different spray rigs online. However we really recommend, and it's on the back of something the Will was talking about earlier, about consistency and the battery options both in the 206 and also the aftermarket battery option pressure pack for the smaller rigs helps with the consistency of application the entire way through the spraying process. So for any information or if you want to find these guys online jump onto the The Lawn IQ have a look through our website, it's all there for you.