Calibrating your sprayer to apply weed killers accurately

The key to accurately applying weed killers is to know how much water your sprayer applies over a given area. If you can determine the water rate applied, it is then an easy step to add the correct amount of weed killer to the tank to apply accurately.

DETERMINE WATER RATE

Step 1: measure out an area  of 10m x 10m square ( this equals a total of 100 square metres)

Step 2: Fill your sprayer with a known amount of plain water ( say10 litres) - do not add weed killer at this point

Step 3: At your usual speed and rhythm, spray the area to evenly apply spray. The ground or target vegetation should be thoroughly      wetted but not excessively to cause saturation or runoff.

Step 4: When finished, top up the sprayer to the original level, noting how much water is used to bring the tank back to the starting level. ( for the purpose of this example lets assume this amount in 2 litres)

Step 5: As most herbicide labels state the rate in litres or grams of product per hectare, we now will need to calculate how many litres per hectare ( 10, 000 sq metres) we are applying with our sprayer.

multiply the amount of water used x 100 ( because there are one hundred lots of 100 square metres in a hectare)

ie 2 litres  x100 = 200 Litres per hectare


DETERMINE CORRECT WEED KILLER RATE TO MIX

Step 6: Read the product label and determine the rate of weed killer to be used per hectare ( let's say for this example it  is 5 litres per hectare)

Step 7: So you would add 5 litres per 200L if your spray tank holds 10 litres  add 250mls per 10 litres 
(nb this is the same ratio as 5 litres per 200 litres of water) 

HOW TO SPRAY

Step 8: Now go spraying maintaining the same speed and rhythm as before

Easy!