How to Calibrate Your Sprayer in a Few Simple Steps

Calibrating your backpack sprayer is essential for effective pest control, ensuring that you're applying the right amount of product over the correct area. This guide will walk you through a simple calibration process to determine how much water you use per acre. Knowing this rate is key to reading labels and mixing the right amount of pesticide product per gallon of water. Most labels are in per acre rates and not per gallon rates, here is how we break that down into gallons.

Step 1: Measure Your Calibration Area

Find a area similar to the terrain you'll be treating. An acre is 43560 square feet. Measure a calibration area of 1/128th of an acre, or 340 square feet. This specific size makes it easy to scale up to an acre when calculating your water usage. Mark this area clearly so you can walk and spray accurately. If needed reduce the size of the area, but try to find an square footage area that easily multiplies into 43560 (Total square feet in an acre).

Step 2: Fill Your Sprayer with Water & Spray

Fill your sprayer with one gallon of water.
Spray your marked area.
Measure how much of the gallon it took to spray your marked area. 

For example if you measured out 340 square feet and it took 1/3 of your gallon to spray that area than your rate would be roughly 1 gallon of water per 1000 square feet. This is a commonly used rate.

All Set: See our guide on how to determine product per gallon rate.