How to Calibrate Your Spreader for Perfect Lawn Coverage

G'day and welcome to The Lawn IQ. This is Will and I'm Hugo and today we're here to run you through how to calibrate your fertiliser spreader. For those who have bought a new The Lawn IQ fertiliser spreader, we've done the hard work for you. For the small spreader, your calibrations are here. For the large 8kg spreader, calibrations are here. And for the battery power one, we've also done all the hard work, your calibrations. So this is our battery spreader. It's our flagship. It's great for anything up to 400m2 It comes with a battery that's also a Makita shape. It has a beautiful, consistent spread over your whole lawn and takes a guesswork out. It has an aperture to make sure that you're not spreading it anywhere you don't want to and a whole bunch of controls across the machine for the openings and also the spinner speed. It's the last spreader you'll ever need. We currently have five different granular products that will go through all of our lawn spreaders. From our protection products to wetting agents and fertiliser. If you haven't bought a Lawn IQ spreader, today we'll run you through how to calibrate your spreader at home. So all you're going to need for your calibration is your spreader, a basic kitchen scale and some sort of tape measure to be able to measure out the area that your spreader is throwing over. Step number one is measuring out your area. Grab yourself a tape measure and measure how large your lawn surface area is because you need to know how much fertiliser you need to spread across your lawn surface area. Step number two is actually measuring a designated area. So this is a little bit more particular than what you guys need to do. But what we've done is laid the tape measure out just to show you that it's five meters. So we've placed a flag every meter and so we've essentially got kind of a meter by meter grid around here. So when we go and spread the fertiliser we'll be able to see how far it's spread across the meterage. And then also we know exactly the weight we've spread across this 25m2 square. So step two we're going to be weighing out our product. Number one, get comfy. You're going to need some basic kitchen scales on a nice hard surface. Set them up and make sure that the weight scale is correct. Grab your spreader, put it onto the kitchen scale and tare them off. Today I've chosen 2kg of product but the end goal here is to be making sure that we're filling up our hopper so that we have a residual after our trial run. I've chosen two kilos that'll work for this small spreader. The next step will be that we're going to be spreading it over our grid that we set up earlier and we'll be coming back, we'll be weighing the quantity that's left over and from there we'll be able to work out exactly how much we're spreading per square meter. Step number three is make sure your settings are set right. Based on our settings set before, set the opening dial to eight, set the speed to three and set the aperture to full open. The next step is setting yourself in the middle of the area you measured out and just walking at a comfortable pace that's nice and slow across the area. On visual inspection the spreader has spread about three and a half meters so half of that 1.75 meters by the side of where I walk. The beauty of The Lawn IQ fertiliser is it's a nice small prill size and it's dropped into the sward of this buffalo here so you don't have to irrigate it as much to get it into the sward. So after you've spread it out over your area we need to get the fertiliser from the spreader back into a bucket, put it back on the kitchen scales, need to zero it and then put our fertiliser back in. And once we work out the difference we're going to know how much fertiliser we've spread over a certain area. So once you know your application rate, if you need to make an adjustment you can do it in a few different ways. For this particular spreader if we want to apply more to an area we can slow down our spreader speed, we can open up our feed rate or we can simply just slow our walking speed. If you want to apply less to the area we can pick up our walking speed obviously, we can close our feed rate or we can also for fine tune adjustments we can increase our spreader speed. The whole point of calibrating our fertiliser spreaders is to make sure that there is no loss. We don't waste any product, we don't over apply any product. If you're looking for any further information on rates, all of our Lawn IQ products have the rates clearly labelled on the buckets and also too you'll find the rates throughout the lawn care plans for the annual plans and the 12-week plans. And that'll change throughout the year to make sure that there's no product wastage.