Spray bottles

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

My personal experience with spray bottles (the kind you buy empty) has been confirmed, sort of. I can’t recall a sprayer I bought that worked right the first time, didn’t leak if tipped, held its prime and/or kept working for any useful period.

I went through garage and basement collecting the half-dozen or so remaining from years of buying them, and not a one worked well enough to use for a new purpose. Not a one was used with corrosive or damaging solutions, not a one was used heavily enough to wear out, none were old enough for seals etc. to have dried out or failed… but not a one worked well enough to even save for garden use.

So I go on Amazon and look… and besides it looking as if all spray bottles are produced by the same Chinese shit shop, the reviews are uniformly awful for all of the above reason, mostly failure to prime/hold prime and severe leaking if tipped.

So WTF? I can’t remember the last commercial spray solution I bought that gave me trouble with the sprayer. Even cheap store-brand window cleaner sprayers work on the first pump, don’t leak, don’t lose prime and work not only all the way through the first load but through several more loads of mild ammonia solution. For less, overall, than most ‘spray bottles.’

Okay, the **solution **is obvious - I’m going to buy a bottle of window cleaner or whatever, dump it in our existing half-full sprayers, and wash that sprayer out to use with the solution (pet odor neutralizer - new puppy) I started off trying to spray.

But seriously-like, what the frack is it with the vast difference between the excellent, even perfect performance of commercial spray stuff and the Fisher-Price-from-Goodwill performance of utility spray bottles?

2

I feel your pain, or something like that. I’ve gone through hundreds of junk sprayers when I worked as a factory janitor. After many years, our supplier finally started selling us higher quality sprayers. They had a handle hinged above the spray tube, the spray rate was much bigger, and the check valve (always the weak spot) took longer to seize up. We got 'em from HP Products, but try your nearest janitor supply place.

Oddly, I haven’t had your perfect luck with commercial bottles of glass cleaner, carpet spotter, and Fantastick. They’ll squirt instead of spraying, put out an odd spray pattern, and take several pumps to get started. Some of them suck in the sides of the bottle.

I picked up a hint. When you can’t get one to start, sometimes it helps to turn it upside down for a few pumps.