If you want glitz and glamour, this story may not be for you. If you’re interested in getting down to the nuts and bolts of cleaning your sprayer so it performs efficiently, and you want to minimize the chance of crop injury from chemical residue hiding in the sprayer, then keep reading.

Fred Whitford, director of Purdue University Pesticide Programs, assembled an entire publication on how to properly clean out a sprayer after you finish applying one chemical and are ready to switch to another. It’s called "Removing Herbicides From Agricultural Application Equipment," or PPP-108.

One part of the publication discusses the importance of screens in the sprayer system and how to service them. Here are five key points about screens.

1. Different names, same purpose. Your sprayer manual may refer to "strainers" or "filters" rather than screens. The principle is the same, Whitford says. Screens are used to remove everything from undissolved plastic bags to sand and grit. Their goal is to remove objects from the system that could be large enough to plug nozzles if they continued flowing through the lines.

2. Flushing vs. cleaning. Flushing and cleaning are not the same things, Whitford insists. If you flush water through a screen, you may remove most of the herbicide residue. “But that’s not the same as taking off the screen and manually cleaning and removing solid herbicide residue,” he says. Some herbicide residue simply won’t dislodge and come out by flushing with water.

Related:See for yourself why triple rinsing pays

3. Screen size. Screens are sized and classified by number of squares per inch or millimeter. The smaller the mesh number, the larger the mesh hole size, Whitford notes. Make sure the mesh is slightly smaller than the exit orifice of the nozzle. Fill screens often have relatively large holes because their job is to filter out the biggest particles in the system. Screens before or after the pump are often 50-mesh, which means they have more but smaller holes than those of a typical fill screen. Whether the screen is located before or after the pump varies with the brand of sprayer.

SPRAYER SCREEN: This screen is located immediately after the pump. On some models it could be located before the pump. (Photo by Fred Whitford, PPP-108)

4. Films on screens. Trapped material that doesn’t pass through forms a film on screens, Whitford says. Even if you have proper agitation in the sprayer, which breaks down dry-product formulations, fine particles can continue to build up on screens.

5. Cleaning films. Though the nozzle tip and orifice are still protected, a film on a screen can lead to issues down the road. Films can eventually interfere with coverage, and they can also pose a threat for damage to sensitive crops, Whitford says. That’s because the film itself includes herbicide residue. That’s why cleaning screens manually and not just flushing them will better ensure there's as little residue left in the system as possible.