Spray Equipment Tips - Power Sprayer Fittings Are Small But Matter Big

Pest / Landscape  Power Sprayers - Watch the Little Stuff

When looking at your existing  Pest Control Sprayer or considering purchasing a new Weed Control Sprayer, don't just look at the expensive parts like Pump, Motor, Reel, etc. Look at everything. It all matters.  

This short video explains how something as small as a plumbing fitting can have a very big impact on your productivity and profitability.  

As always, your comments are appreciated. And if there is a topic you would like to know about, just let me know.

Stay Tuned for the next Spray Equipment Tips video.

Andrew Greess: Hello, this is Andrew Greess of Quality Equipment & Spray, qspray.com. This is the second in a series of videos to help you with your pest and landscape spray equipment. Today, I'm going to talk about power sprayers and why little stuff matters.

Our experience is that when customers are looking at a power sprayer, either their existing power sprayer or to purchase a power sprayer, they look at the big stuff. The pump, the motor, the hose, drill, the tank. That sort of thing. The spray gun.

They don't look at the little stuff. By little stuff, here's an example, fittings. Fittings matter because they can have a big impact on your productivity and on your costs.

For example, these are all half-inch hose barbs. Half-inch male pipe thread by half-inch hose barb. They're all the same type of fitting, except this is a nylon fitting. It's really a piece of crap. Actually, calling this a piece of crap is an insult to pieces of crap all over the world.

This is a poly fitting. This is actually a good fitting for applications using a heavy granular fertilizer. This kind of plastic stands up well to granular fertilizers.

This is a heavy-duty brass fitting. This is what we use in many of our pest and landscape sprayers. This is a steel barb, extra-long. We'd use this on a high pressure application where we wanted to put extra clamps on there to hold.

Why does this matter? Well, here's an example. This is an example of a sprayer one of our customers bought from someone else. You can see here it's using this junky nylon fitting.

Just think about what that fitting will do after a couple of hot summers, a couple of cold winters, or if something falls against it. There's other issues here, too. I mean, this tank fitting is welded into the tank.

You can't fix it, repair it, or anything. It's there. If there's a problem, that's it. There's also a junky hose and junky clamp. That's for another day.

Again, why does this junky fitting matter? Here's a great example. A customer brought this into us. They hit the brakes and the backpack sprayer, the Birchmeier backpack, fell against the tank.

Here's what happened. The tank fitting broke. I'm sorry, the plastic elbow fitting broke. They spilled 50 gallons of chemical.

Also, because the tank fitting was welded into the tank and the backpack hit this tank fitting, it cracked this tank. This is not repairable. This tank was a total loss. Believe me, it gets even worse than that.

They had not centralized all their purchases with one vendor. They didn't even remember who they bought this tank from. We couldn't put our tank in there. It didn't fit in the skid.

They had to go back through all their records from years prior and figure out where they bought this tank from. Finally, they found it. A couple weeks later, it got shipped in. We were able to repair this rig for it.

It was a huge problem and an expensive problem. Dumping gallons of chemical is always a problem. In this case, the Birchmeier backpack fell against it. This fitting here could also fail, just like I said, because of temperature extremes or bouncing around your truck. It's scary. I think you need to look at this.

Here's how we do it. You can see back here. It's a little hard to see. This is our Norwesco tank fitting. This screws on. It's got two gaskets, one inside the tank and one outside the tank.

It's heavy-duty. It can be repaired or it can be replaced if it ever does start to drip. Here, more importantly, you can see we're using all heavy-duty brass fittings here. Then we also put a gauge valve in front of the filter. You can check the filter even when the tank is full.

More importantly, this is brass. Summer in Arizona, or wherever you are, summer's not going to hurt it. Winter's not going to hurt it. It's heavy-duty brass. It's going to stand up to whatever you throw at it.

When you're thinking about buying a new power sprayer, make sure you're looking for these things. If you've got junky fittings on your existing sprayer, think about upgrading them. It will save you a lot of headaches.

Thanks so much for watching. When you're looking for any kind of spray equipment for your pest or landscape company, please think of qspray.com. Thanks very much.