Pest Control Sprayers – Have a Plan Before you have a Problem

Client brought in pest control spray rig and reported that the electric hose reel would not rewind.  It had been giving him problems for a couple of weeks and this day it finally quit. This was not the only problem.  The hose reel was a proprietary hose reel built by the company that built the power spray rig. We had never seen this type of reel before.  We did not have parts for the reel. No other company in AZ had parts for the reel.

We advised the tech that we needed to remove the reel, take it apart and find the problem. The tech had a full schedule of stops so his boss wouldn’t let him stick around so we could start work on the reel. He was going to have to manually roll up the hose by turning the side disc of the electric reel. It was not going to be a fun or productive day for that technician.

Some thoughts:

When buying a pest control sprayer, make sure you are buying name brand components, with readily available replacement parts

When your power spray equipment or manual spray equipment ( B&G Sprayers, Birchmeier Backpacks, etc.) starts letting you know there is a problem, deal with it promptly.  Spray equipment problems never go away by themselves.  Don’t ignore spray equipment problems – they only get worse.  Worse means they take more time and cost more to fix.

Have a backup plan. If my equipment fails today, what is my plan? Can someone else cover the route?  Can we move the customers to another day? Is there backup spray equipment?

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