Importance of Keeping Landscape Power Sprayers Clean

Landscape power sprayers are an important part of your business and you want to make sure that your techs are treating the equipment well.

Regular inspections can help ensure that techs are keeping vehicles and equipment clean. No one wants to see a tech come to a home or business with a dirty truck that has garbage all over it and chemicals on the equipment and all over the truck. Not only does it look bad, but it is dangerous.

Cleaning landscape spray equipment is so important. When filters get clogged they can cause problems dispersing the chemicals. Additionally, without proper maintenance and cleaning of your landscape spray equipment many parts can get clogged besides the filter, there are valves, fittings and eventually your spray gun tips causing more problems. When all these get clogged, you could starve the pump of water and parts will burst causing a very expensive problem.

Fertilizer and chemicals can be tough on equipment which is why sprayers and parts need to be cleaned and maintained. When hoses, fittings and other parts get clogged everything has to work so much harder to try to work. Sediment can settle in the equipment which can harden and make it very difficult to get through. This can cause stress and burnout of the pumps and be very costly.

You can easily avoid these types of problems but making sure to train your techs to clean the equipment regularly. You want to run clean water through your sprayers. Also to prevent these issues from happening, you want to completely empty the tank and inspect it for debris.

It doesn’t take too much time but it is so important to make sure techs are cleaning your landscape power spray equipment, so you don't have these kinds of problems.

When you need a landscape power sprayer or any landscape spray equipment visit https://www.qspray.com/.

Andrew Greess: Hi, this is Andrew Greess from Quality Equipment & Spray Qspray.com. Today we're going to talk about landscape power sprayers and why it's so critical to keep them clean. We've got some great photos of other equipment.

Hopefully you'll learn from some of these photos how to avoid some of these problems of downtime, chemical spills, exposure, missed appointments, etc. Let's get started.

Here's the first photo. Here's a technician who used his company's vehicle. This is the passenger side compartment. He used it as a trash can. Is this an equipment problem? No, but any tech that would do this to your vehicle is probably mistreating your equipment. This is a warning sign that you need to do some inspections.

Here's a landscape spray. You can see it's covered in orange, which is the pre-emergent. This needs to be cleaned up. This is just terrible. Here's a worse example. You can see the pre-emergent is spilled all over this tank, and you can see from the different colors here, that it's been spilling for quite some time.

This is a risk to the employee. It's sending a bad message about your company and certainly no one from the company is inspecting this equipment. Really terrible.

Here's the hose reel roller guides. You can see that the roller guides are covered in chemical, which means the hose is covered in chemical. Just a bad idea. Here's a filter that was totally clogged with pre‑emergent and this has all kinds of downstream problems.

You'll see here that the pre‑emergent is starting to clog this valve. Here it's starting to clog a fitting. What's going to happen is, eventually it's going to clog your spray gun tips, or it's going to starve your pump, and here's an example.

The filter and the lines were so clogged that it starved the pump of water and this diaphragm burst. It's hard to see, but there's a split in the diaphragm. If you catch this quick enough it's just replacing the diaphragms. If you don't catch it quick enough you have to replace the entire pump. This can be a really expensive problem.

Here's a pump that was totally clogged up. You're going to break something if you let it get this clogged. You got to clean out your equipment. You can't let it get this bad.

Here's a fitting that was totally starting to clog with chemical. I don't know if this is fertilizer or this is a pre‑emergent with a dye in it, but I call this the McDonald's photo. This is my arteries after eating cheeseburgers from McDonald's for a couple of years. Think about how much harder your pump has to work sucking through this kind of fitting.

Someone brought in a sprayer and said it didn't spray. We started looking through hoses and fittings and found just totally gunked up...This looks like dirt or mud or something that was just clogged in the lines. Think about how much downtime you have with this and how hard your pump has to work.

Fertilizer can be tough on equipment. Here's a pickup tube that's clogged with fertilizer. This is the worst example I've ever seen. Here's another pickup tube, totally clogged with fertilizer. This came out of this sprayer, and this is fertilizer that has just become sediment.

The bottom of the tank is about six or seven inches thick and totally clogged the entire system. We had to cut the tank apart. The pump was a total loss. Most of the plumbing was a total loss. Here's some of the fittings from that sprayer. You can see that the pump was trying to suck through totally solid fertilizer.

This was a really, really expensive problem for this company. Don't let this happen to you.

Make sure you're training your techs to clean the equipment regularly. You want to run clean water through your sprayers. To prevent this from happening, you want to totally empty your tank and inspect it for debris, and you want to make sure your techs are doing what you want them to do. Make sure they're cleaning your equipment, so you don't have these kinds of problems.

When you do need a landscape power sprayer or any landscape spray equipment, please think of QSpray.com. Thanks so much for watching. Have a great day.