Lawn spreaders and sprayers are tools that can make yard work a whole lot easier. Spreaders make it simple to apply dry, granular products to lawns or soil. Sprayers make applying liquid products simple. These can include fertilizer, insecticides, herbicides, and other yard care products.
Whether you need spreaders or sprayers is largely a matter of personal choice and how much you’ll use them. If you’re a homeowner with a small yard who only applies fertilizer a couple of times a year, you might just want to rent a spreader or apply the fertilizer by hand. In contrast, if you’re a professional lawn care worker who fertilizes or applies herbicides to multiple lawns every year, a spreader will be a good investment.
Who Should Use a Sprayer?
Sprayers come in a wide range of sizes and styles for different uses. There’s at least one sprayer that will work for just about anyone who takes care of outdoor spaces.
A small hand-held sprayer works perfectly for mixing up and applying weed killer around the house. Homeowners with larger properties might find that a larger hand-held sprayer or a manual backpack sprayer is worth the investment to help them work more quickly.
For professional use, hand-held or manual backpack sprayers can work very well for the precision application of weed killers, fertilizers, and other liquid lawn care products. If you’re a professional working on a property that requires larger-scale product application (such as treating an orchard with pesticides), powered backpack sprayers make big jobs like that much simpler.
Understanding the Types of Sprayers
Manual sprayers allow for quick, convenient, and precise application of liquid lawn and garden care products. They come in several styles, including small hand-held sprayers, canister models, and canisters carried like a backpack.
Powered backpack sprayers make it easy to work on large properties. These backpack sprayers are powered by a gasoline engine or a battery-powered motor. They can still be used for precision application, but have a much longer spray range. Some versatile models can be used as a duster or blower as well as a sprayer.
You can also get powered spreader-sprayer equipment for large-scale commercial use. These sprayer-spreaders let you treat large properties more quickly. They’re best, though, for spraying liquid down across a lawn rather than into trees and landscaping (though some models offer sprayer wand attachments to make them more versatile).
Best Brands and Model Options
Here at Richardson Saw, we recommend STIHL and Echo for manual and powered sprayers for homeowner and commercial use. These reliable brands provide sprayers of the highest quality.
STIHL offers a compact hand-held bottle sprayer you can operate with one hand. Echo offers lightweight canister sprayers with a 2-gallon or 3-gallon capacity. Both Echo and STIHL also offer manual backpack sprayers, making it more convenient to carry the sprayer canister around the yard.
STIHl’s powerful backpack sprayers help you tackle larger jobs with ease. They offer a couple of different gasoline-powered models, as well as a battery-powered sprayer. The most powerful of their backpack sprayers easily converts to a duster as well.
We also carry large, wheeled, commercial-grade sprayer-spreader combo machines from Z-Turf Equipment and Scag. Both brands offer powerful, versatile tools for large-scale and commercial lawn care.
Who Should Use a Spreader?
Whether you need a lawn spreader is largely a matter of personal choice and how much you’ll use it.
If you’re a homeowner with a small yard who only applies fertilizer once or twice a year, you might just want to rent a spreader or apply the fertilizer by hand. However, some homeowners will find that a spreader is a good tool to help save time while fertilizing or treating large yards if they apply products to the lawn multiple times a year.
If you’re a professional lawn care worker who fertilizes or applies herbicides to multiple lawns every year, a spreader will be a good investment. Having the right tool for the job makes everything go more smoothly. Evenly spreading a product over the lawn also helps keep the lawn looking professionally maintained for your clients.
Understanding the Types of Spreaders
There are two main types of manual spreaders: drop spreaders and broadcast spreaders. Drop spreaders drop whatever product you fill them with directly under the spreader. They are best for smaller yards because they cover a relatively small area with each pass. However, they are very precise in their application.
Broadcast spreaders spray the product you’re using out in a fan-like pattern. They are less precise, but let you quickly cover large lawn spaces. You’ll just need to be a little extra careful to make sure you don’t get lawn products in the wrong place (for example, herbicides in the flower bed).
For large-scale professional use, you can also get powered spreader-sprayer combo machines. These sprayer-spreaders let you quickly treat large commercial properties like industrial campuses, schools, golf courses, and more. Some are maneuverable enough that you can still use them on residential lawns as well.
Best Brands and Model Options
Here at Richardson Saw, we carry spreaders from Shindaiwa and Echo. They are reliable, easy-to-use broadcast spreaders that make it simple to distribute fertilizer, herbicide, and more across the lawn.
In addition, we carry the larger, commercial spreaders from Z Turf and Scag that also work as sprayers. If you need to spread grass seed, fertilizer, or herbicide across large properties as a regular part of your commercial landscaping work, a sprayer-spreader like this can be a good addition to your equipment fleet.
If you’re looking for a new spreader or sprayer to use around the house or purchase for your commercial lawn or landscaping business, come see us at Richardson Saw & Lawnmower. We’ll be happy to answer any questions you have and help you pick out just the right sprayers and spreaders to meet your yard care needs.
