Monday, June 10, 2013

AMDRO Powerflex Pest and Weed System Troubleshooting

Recently, I received the AMDRO Powerflex Pest and Weed System for the purpose of review.  I am saddened to report that our AMDRO Powerflex system did not work. In an attempt to find solutions to get our system to work, we scoured the internet.  We read solutions on the AMDRO Facebook page, the Home Depot website, Here are some tips we learned while attempting to troubleshoot our system.

ALERT!! Do This First!!!!  Get a permanent magic marker and draw a line down the side of the red ring into which you insert the cartridge.  Ensure that you continue the line down onto the white spray gun.  While you are twisting the cartridge hold onto the red ring and watch to ensure that the line does not move.  If you twist the red ring you will kink the hose inside the spray gun. 


Gently over twisting can cause the hose to kink and will prevent the flow of water and concentrate.


This should prevent problems; however, here are a few other troubleshooting tips that we discovered.

1. Never run the unit dry.  Just for the record, we never did this.

2. Never run the unit with kinks in the hose.  We had attempted to straighten out the hose to the best of our ability prior to running the unit for the first time.

3. Insert fresh batteries.  This seemed like a surefire winner; alas, no luck.

4. Try turning the red tip at the end of the sprayer wand.  We tried and tried and tried again with no luck.

5. Try repeatedly placing your finger over the red tip at the end of the sprayer wand while pulling the trigger.  This seemed logical but it was ineffective.

6. Do not over twist the cartridge.  This is where you need to be super, super careful!! Please see the red ALERT above.

Now, this is where AMDRO would have you pick up the phone and call them.  They would also settle for you sending them an email message.   Confession time.  We are the kind of people that exhaust all of our options first before we call the manufacturer.   Plus my husband just likes to take things apart.  Luckily, he's also very successful at fixing things and getting them put back together properly. Now, I am fairly certain that this is not the solution AMDRO would advise.  However, this did work for us.

We removed the five screws on the right side of the sprayer gun.  We gently took the right side off the sprayer gun.  This is what we discovered: 


It gets twisted up behind the trigger. Turn the red ring where you load the cartridge to untwist the hose. 


While untwisting the hose you should easily notice one hose which has become disconnected.  It's fairly easy to ascertain where it goes.  Simply place the hose at the end of the yellow arrow to the plastic nub at the end of the blue arrow ensuring that you slide the hose all the way on to he nub. 


Once this has been completed you can reassemble your spray gun, paying attention to ensure the hose at the bottom of the handle is lies in its designated hole between the halves.  You will also need to ensure that the battery cover is properly inserted into the holding slots on both halves of the spray gun.  My husband found that having an extra set of hands really helped this process along.  Even though I was helping it did take a couple of tries before we were successful at holding everything in place and matching up the two sides.  A little finesse and a lot of patience is key during this part.  

Once we got everything back together and the five screws back in place, we held our breath as he pulled the trigger. We are now very pleased to report that our AMDRO Powerflex system works perfectly! Now Pests and Weeds watch out!!! I'm armed and dangerous!

In looking for solutions online, we read several reviews and it seems that the sprayer gun not working is a fairly prevalent problem.  If these problems are being caused by the red ring turning and twisting the hose inside the gun, then it seems to me that this would be a fairly easy fix during manufacturing.  A little glue on the left side of the sprayer gun could hold the red ring in place or redesign it to include tabs on the red ring and slots on the white sprayer gun.  It doesn't seem like this is an overly complicated problem.  Granted, I am completely uneducated about manufacturing but it seems that fixing this would be a cheaper option than replacing sprayer guns.  Anyway, other than this design flaw, we are very grateful for the opportunity to try the AMDRO Poweflex Pest and Weed system.




I received the AMDRO Powerflex free for the purpose of review from BzzAgent.




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