Our Stabilus is a knapsack sprayer with an 18-litre capacity stainless steel tank and 6 BAR maximum spraying pressure which will give a maximum flow rate of 2.0 litres per minute.
When you receive your sprayer, the first thing that you see is the box and this gave me a very good first impression; brightly coloured with plenty of good quality, informative photos and a construction that felt strong enough to hold and give some protection to the contents. I also liked the way that the carry handle for the sprayer tank had been integrated into the box so that you use it to carry the box itself. I thought that this was a nice touch and somewhat unusual.
Upon opening the box the first thing I was confronted with was the instruction manual, or rather, manuals. 48 pages in the first manual, 7 of which are in English (the rest are a range of other languages showing how popular these sprayers are around the world). The manual tells you pretty much everything that you need to know from a welcome message and safety notices through technical information, assembly instructions, care, maintenance and warranty information and, don’t forget, the faults guide. There is also a leaflet containing metering and liquid distribution information and another sheet showing an exploded diagram of the sprayer giving part numbers should you need to order any spare parts.
Putting the paperwork to one side, it was time to have a look at the sprayer. Everything was nicely packed around the tank so to remove the sprayer from the box only required a gently pull and wiggle on the handle and the tank lifted out easily. My first impression of the sprayer is that it felt substantial and it looked great, after all it is made of stainless steel so it’s very shiny and just looks like a sprayer should look. The hose and sprayer lance handle are already attached to the tank so assembly really is quick and easy. The only, very slight, issue I have is that the sprayer can only be pumped with your left hand. Due to the construction, it can’t be set either left or right handed. Anyway, moving on, the lance just needs to be screwed onto the lance handle and the two shoulder straps attached. I have found some shoulder straps to be a little fiddley to attach to the sprayer tank but these were quite straight forward. The whole tank assembly took less than 5 minutes from opening the box to fitting the second shoulder strap.
As with all the knapsack sprayers within the Mesto range, the tank has a wide neck which makes filling easy and the lid was very easy to open to close. There is a plastic filter which, I would recommend, leaving in place so that nothing can be added to the tank that could block the nozzle when spraying. So, with tank filled I put the sprayer on and with the padded shoulder straps I thought the sprayer was very comfortable and sat well on my back. There is plenty of adjustment in the shoulder straps so all shapes and sizes should be well accommodated.
After all of this, I was ready to spray. It took 20 compressions of the tank handle and I was at the maximum 6 BAR. This is a very impressive pressure as many sprayers, only reach 3 BAR so I was interested to see how powerful 6 BAR was. The answer, the liquid does come out with some force and is noticeably stronger than 3 BAR sprayers. As the pressure is built within the compression tube, inside the tank, there is no pressure release valve and you can open the tank lid whilst spraying if you wish. This may sound pointless but it does mean that you could have the tank filled whilst spraying. This would mean that you don’t have to stop, remove the sprayer, decompress, refill, put the sprayer back on and pressurise. This could be quite a time saver.
