This is an Epic hydroseeder out of our rental fleet. I'm out here working at my house this weekend. I have an area out here about an acre and a half or so of new lawn that we're putting in. We've come out and we have burned off the weeds with a sprayer in the back of my RTV. We've used an FFC preparator to take off the stones and smooth out the dirt. We've put the seed down in the soil using a Land Pride slit seeder. And now we need to stick everything down and make sure it doesn't wash off. It is a 92-degree, humid, dry day, not the best temperatures for doing grass seeds, but with all of the rolling hills out here I have and stormwater swales, we've got to get this thing stuck down or else we're going to have runoff issues and stuff with the dirt.
So this machine here serves several purposes, going to show you how it works, talk about some of the products that go into it, tell you a little bit about the 20 hours or so that I've spent working with this thing here over about the last two and a half days. So there are several reasons why you would hydroseed. I'm going to go through and use this today, mostly for soil stabilization. I'm using the hydroseeder to apply both a paper and a glue product to it that takes that soil that's been worked and smoothed out and had the rocks removed and kind of stick it in place so it doesn't run off in the next thunderstorm.
Many times when you're using this, you're also going to use it in order to apply fertilizer and seed as well. Now, I went through and put my seed down using a Land Pride slit seeder here in a previous video. In my mind, that's kind of the best way to go about putting your seed down because it gives you the best seed to soil contact and can put the seed down in a very consistent manner with rate controls and stuff coming off the back of that slit seeder. Some people will choose to mix their seed and fertilizers into these tanks as well and put everything down at one shot. That's very acceptable and a great way to do this, but for someone like me who struggles a little bit to put this down very consistently, putting the seed on the ground with the slit seeder was a much better idea.
You can see here from the back of the machine, mechanically, kind of how this thing works. So you have a 25 horsepower engine here that drives this big pump assembly. This pump has an intake down here off the bottom of the tank, and then has three outputs here that come off of it. One output is going to go over here to the hose reel that I can use in order to spray the material down on the ground. This one is going to go back here and then feed agitators through the bottom of the tank and also feed a large fire hose turret up here on the front. And this top one right here is for an agitator that goes in the top.
Now, machines like this need a lot of agitation. What you're putting in here is effectively a paper product, a glue, and again, that fertilizer or seed. And so that paper product is a majority of what's in here. And a tank this size, this is 650 gallons of water, you're putting in somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 to 250 pounds of paper that all gets slurried around into what is a giant spitball at the end of the day and then shot out through that hose. A lot of the water coming out of this pump is to drive those agitation pumps and everything on the inside of the unit to get that slurry created.
If you're in any kind of environment where your time matters, one of the most time consuming things with this unit is getting it filled with water. One of the best ways to get that filled is to use a trash pump where you can pump out of a creek or a pond or something in order to fill this guy up. And you've got outlets over here on the side of the tank in order to do this. While I was out here, I was using my traditional garden hose in order to fill this up. It kind of worked okay for me. I was a one man show out here on a weekend, so while this thing was filling with water, I was out running another piece of equipment, putting down seed or something like that. But something this large takes about two hours to fill off of a traditional garden hose, and that's a good flow hose, a three quarter inch hose coming out to it. So it can take a long time in order to get all the water into it that you need, but a trash pump hookup here is going to go a lot faster.
There are two ways to put your slurry product then down on the ground after you have it all mixed up. On the back of the machine here, I have a 200 foot hose with a hand hose on it that I can pull out to spray that down onto the ground, and it does a nice job. It is, however, a lot of work. Pulling out a 200 foot long, two inch hose, with all the weight, plus all the water weight going through the hose, is a lot of work. It gives you respect for the firemen when you do that kind of thing. This is much faster though. This turret right here is going to use two different nozzles, a wide one or a long range one, in order to take that and have a lot more of the power coming out of the pump, feeding up through this and putting that material down much more quickly.
So I've talked about the materials here several times now that go into the tank. This is the stuff that I'm using. Now, I've used probably about three different brands of tack glue product, three different brands of the mulch, two different brands of fertilizer. I'm kind of cleaning up all the odds and ends here of what I was able to find. Actually, in the middle of inventory shortages right now, some of this stuff is challenging to find. I had a tough time coming by enough of the mulch product.
Every time that you go through and you add a different one of these, you're going to want to look at the containers and read the rate charts to find out what proportion you should be mixing this stuff into your tank. In my case, this tank has been lasting me somewhere between about a fifth to a quarter of an acre or so, so in the neighborhood of about eight to 10,000 square feet per tank. Generally, these are measured in pounds per 1,000 square feet. So you simply go through and multiply by how much coverage area you're going to get out of it, and then that's what you load into the tank.
So you usually have a couple of different kind of fill ports in the top of the tank. So one side here to the back is where the fresh water fill is at. And you've got this large one here in the front where you load your different products into. Now, this is a bale of mulch. As tempting as it is to take this thing and stuff the whole brick right down in the hole, it only makes the mixing process longer. So generally what I'm going to do is sit here and kind of calve off some chunks, see, and not take this and stuff that whole thing down in there. That's too big. I'm sure more powerful machines, you see these things that can be truck and trailer mounted. They make some really big seeders. They can probably take a whole bale, but in the case of this smaller unit, it's best just to go through and chunk this stuff off and throw it in in pieces.
Now, this is going to get stirred up by a top agitator in the back there, and then three holes that come out, about three eighths inch holes that are in a pipe that runs across the bottom that come out with a lot of pressure. This is nearly pressure washer amount of stuff here that's going to go through a break this up. So that's my first bale. We're going to add three more here in order to get this to the right consistency. One thing I've learned, this is quite a young man's job. It's physical. Grabbing each one of these bales, tossing them up here on top of the machine, ripping open the plastic, breaking them apart, getting the next one. It's physical work. And like I said, it's 90 degrees outside here today, too. That and the hose, that two inch hose, if you use the hand hose to spread the thing out in order to put this stuff down, running these things is a lot of work. So when one of those landscape guys tells you what it costs to pay to get this done, have a little respect for the amount of work that they're doing.
So you can see here, I've got enough in that I've got some paper accumulating at the top of the tank here. Now, for Kind of knowing how much of this stuff to put in, I think it's kind of like mixing pancake batter, right? At least for me, when I make pancakes, I never really measure everything out, right? I dump and mix to consistency. So you're kind of watching for the slurry in here start to get thick and do you see proportional amounts of paper coming up and around in the water stream that's going around the inside?
I tend to find that as I did multiple loads, I was having to put in more paper at the beginning than I was at the end. So once I kind of finished a load and sprayed everything out or kind of had it down to about a fifth full at the bottom, that bottom amount in there would have a lot of paper product in it. So in my case, while I was starting with five bales, here as I've been getting closer to the end, I've only needed to put in about four or so because the amount of paper hanging in the bottom of the tank.
There are several different brands of product for this mulch. Generally the more expensive ones are going to come with more wood fiber content in them, which will last longer on the ground than the more paper based products do. You'll also find some that have tackifier, the glue that holds all this together, already included in the bale, where I'm buying my tackifier in separate containers. The next step is fertilizer. In the case of this, I need about half this bag. If you buy your fertilizer, you're going to want to buy something that's water soluble. So not a regular granule fertilizer. This is one that's made to dissolve in the solution here. And lastly, this is my tack. And again, might be included in your paper product already. For me, it's not. Once you put this in, if you run your hand through the solution, you'll feel that it gets almost creamy feeling. It'll start to stick to your skin a little bit.
Driving the truck over, it's a lot more efficient than trying to pull that long hose out. And then we just reposition periodically to cover different areas. This is the fun part. It's like having your own personal fire truck. So with the turret right here, I can get a nice arc to an area further away from me and lay this stuff out. Now, you do not want to take this and point it straight at the ground. You need to work at areas that are pretty far away from you. If you take it and you shoot in a spot that's too close, it's almost too much power. And what'll happen is it kind of causes the soil to tumble forward and it kind of makes these little spit wads essentially. It doesn't kind of come up with a nice blanket that you get at the end of this.
This is my least favorite part of this thing. So I've got a couple of areas up here that are too far away for me to get to with the turret. That's it, I've got about 100 foot of that out. If I shoot right here at the dirt, I make globs and I don't get a good clean carpet. So we're going to head up here with this thing up to my skipper up here at the top. I'm sure somebody who's better with this thing wouldn't leave skippers like I do. So I'd say using this versus a turret, not all machines like this have a turret, this is a lot slower. You can see, I don't get near the volume out of this, but I could tell you, I probably do a better job. My end result is more consistent. I get less globby areas than I do with the turret. And I'm sure somebody who does this professionally probably could do a more consistent job than I do, but for a novice, and about two days worth of working this thing, this will give you the better end result.
I do find, every once in a while, this thing will, not clog, I guess something at the end of the nozzle doesn't want to come out. The thing about this thing is garbage in, garbage out, right? If you let trash and stuff get into this machine, it can clog things up. Now, as I'm working here, I'm periodically turning around and keeping an eye on the tank, just kind of watching where my level's at. You don't want to run this thing down too far. It's good to leave a little bit of liquid in the bottom in order to get us started again when you put your next batch in, at least that's what I've found. I don't like running it down too far. The idea of this thing plugging up just kind of terrifies me, because, man, you've got to clean it up. It is a chore.
This unit is no longer available to rent.
