Weed Control Sprayer – How Bad Design Hurts Business
Posted by Andrew Greess on Sep 27, 2011
Client brought a weed control sprayer in for repairs. The weed power sprayer used a fiberglass tank split into 2 tanks. The tank was fine but the problem was the plumbing. The company that built the sprayer ran the plumbing lines for the 2nd tank through the middle of the 1sttank. One of these lines cracked, causing contamination as the chemicals mixed. Here are some photos:
Notice how the pickup line runs through the wall into the other tank.
The small capped line at the top of this photo is the bypass line. Notice how it runs through the wall into the other tank. This line had cracked inside the other tank, causing contamination in that other tank. We capped it and reran the line on the outside of the tank.
The photo on the right shows the exterior of the tank. The red arrow shows the bypass line that we capped off. We re-ran this line on the outside of the tank the way it should have been done originally.
The blue arrow shows the pickup lines for the two tanks. You can see how both lines run into the close tank and therefore one of the lines runs through the first tank into the second.
This is obviously terrible design that caused downtime. Cross contamination can be an expensive proposition (think post emergent in your preemergent tank).
The only reason we can think of for this design was to put all the hoses and fittings inside the tank to make the sprayer easier to ship. This seems backward to us. A weed sprayer rig should be designed for long term, productive use not for 1 time shipping. Figure out a better way to ship it. When we ship rigs we have specially designed boxes that go over the sprayers to protect them.
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