WINNIPEG Ñ Farmers can’t waste time when it’s a busy season like spraying, says Dale Wiens.
The Beechy, Sask., farmer and inventor of the SprayTest remote valve control said checking for plugged nozzles is a routine task that is often skipped because the clock is ticking.
“You’ve got to stop your sprayer, open up the valves, get out of the cab, run down the steps, run around to both ends of the boom, mark the plugged nozzle and hope you marked the right one, then run back up the steps to turn the valves off again. You’ve got to do all this fast, without tripping on the steps, and while the chemical is spraying. And you might repeat the procedure two or three times before you have everything flowing again.
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“Is it any wonder we see weed strips in fields when a plugged nozzle goes 500 acres before it’s fixed?” he said.
“How many times in a busy day does a guy check for plugged nozzles? Maybe once in the morning before he starts? Maybe again once during the day? Or maybe never.”
Wiens said an operator can only see the nozzles that are toward the ends of the boom. The closer nozzles, the ones located where the operator can’t see them, are the ones that collect the dust thrown up by tires. Those hidden nozzles are the ones most likely to need attention.
Wiens said he farmed for many years thinking that if the nozzles were all spraying first thing in the morning, they should keep spraying all day. However, he was frustrated by the plugged nozzles he did find and the time it required to spot and fix them.
When two people were available to check nozzles, it was quick and little chemical went on the ground or on the person. But in a one-person spraying operation, it took too much time and there was too much chemical exposure for the operator.
Wiens decided he needed to create a simple mechanism for performing the menial on-off task with only one person and with no need to keep running up and down the steps.
The result was a system that brought together the existing technology of a remote garage opener and a 12-volt electric valve.
His SprayTest remote boom control allows the operator to turn off all nozzles while seated in the cab. Then, the operator walks behind the boom with a keychain remote, switching the various boom segments on and off to check for plugs.
“You just press the button for the boom section you want and then release it immediately,” Wiens said. “That’s all it takes to turn that valve on and then off again, and that’s all the time you need to check the nozzles in that bank. I’ve got a 95-foot Flexi-Coil split into just two sections, and I can check that very easily with just a couple seconds of valves turned on.
“When you find a plugged nozzle, you clean it up, then stand back and quickly flip it on again to make sure it’s spraying right. … It would be less than 20 seconds of spray time, even if it was a big boom and there were several plugs and you double checked.”
He said it may be no big deal if glyphosate is dumped on the ground during a nozzle check. That’s not going to hurt anything. But if a farmer is spraying with group 2 or some of the other residual products, he might see that 95-foot burn strip for five years before it clears up. And that can cost a lot more money.
Wiens said those burn strips are not the only money losers. A plugged nozzle leaves lines of weeds in the field. Not only do those strips cause lower productivity in the current year, the weed carryover can play havoc with crop rotation plans.
“The more you think about it, the more money plugged nozzles cost you,” said Wiens. “Here’s another aspect. You are still spending the same dollars on each acre for that application, but a plugged nozzle means you are not putting your chemical on the entire acre. These plugged nozzle strips become very expensive.
“Chemical exposure, safety and health Ñ that’s the other big motivator behind this thing. We all know we should wear the big rubber boots and the full protective outfit and the masks when we’re spraying. But let’s be honest. When it’s 28 degrees and you’re pushing 100 percent to get finished, how many of us wear the protective gear?”
When he introduced the SprayTest three years ago, Wiens produced different control boxes for two-boom, four-boom and six-boom sprayers. Now in their third generation of development, there are only two SprayTest models. The standard equipment six-boom controller is designed to handle different sprayers by installing it with different wiring harnesses.
Wiens said some new sprayers have seven booms, so the optional SprayTest is built to handle up to eight boom sections. It is a matter of custom building the wire harness specifically for each sprayer. Some manufacturers have one harness that fits their whole line of sprayers. Others are more complicated.
“Normally, there’s a weather pack that hooks the valves into the wire harness on a sprayer. We always try to go right to those valves to tee in our electrical connection for on-off. The valves use 12 volts, so that’s what we use to keep it simple. There are sprayers like FlexiCoil that use a CanBus system between the cab and controls at the back, but we like to stay with the simple 12-volt power. This way, our harness can be installed or removed in 10 or 15 minutes.”
For the first two years of production, the SprayTest control box was installed in the cab, with cables running back to the boom. For 2005, the control is enclosed in a weather-proof box mounted back at the booms and close to the valves. This means the keychain radio remote is closer to the control box for a better signal.
Wiens said that on a few of the early production units, there was trouble with relays that were exposed to the weather. The SpraCoupe and the John Deere require two relays on each valve; one to open and one to close. So a five section boom has 10 relays exposed to the elements. Wiens sent anyone who had those early units a new harness with protected relays, whether they had problems or not.
“We had a Rogator customer down in Montana. We couldn’t get the wiring schematic from the manufacturer, so we assembled what we thought was the right harness. It worked for a while, then it didn’t work,” he said.
“We drove five and a half hours down to Montana, spent 20 minutes fixing the wiring, then drove five and a half hours back home. If you’re a small company selling to farmers, and you don’t willingly provide that level of service, word gets around pretty quick, even from Montana.”
Although a small number of the new 2005 units have already been sold and installed, the official debut of the revised SprayTest will be at the Farm Progress Show in Regina in June.
The standard six-boom unit ranges in price from $860 to $1,005 depending on which harness is required. Prices for the new eight-boom SprayTest start at $1,100. Installation can generally be completed within 15 minutes.
