Herbicide in your spray rig?

[jed1124]

First time post. Awesome sight! I've spent a ton of time reading here and now I have a question. I am putting a PHC proposal together for an estate. It is a large proposal and covers a lot of different work. The customer is looking for a arborist that can offer the total package, from GTC to PHC with everthing in between including poison ivy sprays. I have never used ANY herbicides in my spray rig. My question is can I clean my spray rig adequitely after using a herbicide or do herbicides always have to have rigs designated for them. Are there any products that can be recommended for cleaning after their use? Thank you in advance for any suggestions.

 

[BIGTWIG]

Not worth the risk of any residual herbicide that could stay in your tree rig in my opinion. I know there are good tank cleaners out there, but it is still not something I would do. Can you get by using backpack sprayers or sub any of the herbicide work to save money from buying another rig?

 

[GregManning]

As a very general rule of thumb, science labs & engineering/production vessels consider a complete “fill-and-MT”, repeated 3 or 4 times to get a reasonably clean vessel, if the solution & material are soluble.

Many herbicides, pesticides, etc are suspensions. Then it gets real messy, and “iffy”.

Just another note, many, many smaller volumes are more efficient, as long as they contact all surfaces (e.g. shaking, spraying the entire inside, etc).

I use at least 3-4 small volumes, very well shaken, to clean out my hand spray rig after using RoundUp. Make sure all the hoses, nozzles, etc. see that rinse.

Twenty-five (25) years ago I had ~35 fruit trees & a row of grapevines which I maintained. I used a wagon mounted spray system. Many of the sprays were suspensions. I just allowed the pump to recycle into the tank (which was pretty violent mixing), without problem. Dump & repeat !

 

[jed1124]

Thanks guys. I'm going to go with the back pack sprayer after further thought. No sense in risking getting even a small amount of herbicide on the trees we care for. Spot treatments in the back of the property would not be efficient with the truck anyway.

 

[Naturalway]

Just an example, a local company here once had a tech spray all the trees on a property with a mixture of broadleaf herbicide and lawn fert. They had two tanks on the trunk, one for lawns and one for trees, but the inevitable happened that the tech mixed them up. Luckily, the tech was terrible at spraying and got very poor coverage based on the resulting damage. Wipe-Out and those other products are good, we have used them, but not good enough to clean a tank one day and spray the next, especially with the possibility of user error. And then what to do with the rinse water?