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Eastern Iowa | I probably should have posted this yesterday but couldn't find time to get to the computer to type it on here. A few pages back (page 4 or 5 I believe) I had posted the problems that we were experiencing with our Insight, direct command, and TeeJet ball valves. I won't rewrite the whole thing but bottom line was the polyswitch (resettable fuse) in the TeeJet ball valves were being tripped, leaving the ball valve in an either open or closed position. After waiting a half minute, the polyswitch would reset itself and you could start spraying again untill you noticed the problem again, which was usually just a matter of minutes. On Tuesday, we had two TeeJet engineers from Chicago and a TeeJet gentleman from Des Moines come out to the farm and they installed the enclosed resistor w/ heatsink in series with each of the six ball valves on our sprayer. We sprayed for a bit, then they would check stuff out, spray, check stuff out. They felt comfortable with how their new stuff was running and set me loose. We sprayed roughly 200 acres after they left and haven't had a single ball valve problem. Previous to them installing their new equipment, it wasn't uncommon to have a ball valve fail evrey 5-10 minutes. I really have to give credit to TeeJet on this one. I don't feel that they had any problems with their equipment but they did take the drivers seat on creating a fix around the problem. Ultimately I think that the direct command was the culprit in this situation. Don't get me wrong, I love the direct command and wouldn't want to go back to spraying without it, but personally I believe it was the root cause of the issues we were having. Here is my justification. If we run our Trimble 252 GPS on 1Hz, we can spray all day with absolutely no problems. We changed it to 5Hz and the polyswitches in the ball valves were tripping contunuously. We eventually got tired of them tripping (and at that time didn't know what was causing the problem) and turned the autoswath feature off and just used the master and individual boom section switches manually. Running it manually we again had absolutely no problems with polyswitches tripping. After TeeJet came out and installed their equipment, we switched the GPS back to 5Hz and ran the rest of the day with no problems. Once again, thanks to the TeeJet guys for staying on top of this one! | |
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Fix for Teejet Ball valves tripping internal reset
