Garden Sprinklers

The sprinklers in our yard proved to be quite tricky. 

At first we thought that we only had six sprinkler heads. After switching on the water, we soon found many more and not all of them in working order. In fact, we found two lines generously watering the concrete block walls around our property about a foot down under the ground. 

Whoever decided to just run an uncapped pipe to the wall...who knows what they were thinking...

We first had to decide what zones we needed.

1. Grass

2. Vegetable Garden 

3. Flower Garden

Three solenoids (water valves) for three zones.

Each zone can be switched on or off independently from a central computer/timer. We managed to capitalize on a more energy efficient unit that ended up only being $10 after state rebates. It even has a rain catcher that would change the amount of water used for a rainy day.

For the vegetable garden, we didn't want to waste water on pathways so we decided to go with micro drippers. That meant that we needed locations of raised PVC pipes to tap into.

These locations were determined by the locations of our raised garden beds. They are great for your back and easy to tend. Each box got a PVC pipe coming up the center.

That pipe split to a tee which we then used a transition piece to switch from PVC pipe to a black flexible pipe.

This flexible black pipe is then tapped into with smaller micro-tubing that can be plugged up when not in use. The micro-tubing can be cut to whatever length is needed to reach your plants. The micro-tubing needs to be soaked with hot water in order to get around the small connectors and drippers to fit tightly. The drippers come in a range of volume released per hour. We used only two types: green drippers (2 gallons per hour) and red drippers (4 gallons per hour). There are also smaller drippers for plants that require even less water. We also used soaker tubes for smaller plants that are located closer to one another. The soaker tube has alot of small punctures along its length to basically "ooze" the water out and onto the ground.

  The pressure on the line can easily blow the connectors off if they are not connected properly as well. We tested our pressure at one of our hose bibs (spigots) with a cheap pressure gauge from the hardware store and compared it with the required max pressure allowed for the drippers. Our pressure turned out to be high so we bought a pressure regulator to place on our PVC pipe. We put it on after the solenoid (between the solenoid and the garden).

After checking that all of the connections are water tight (where they need to be), we were then able to  finish off our system by setting our timer. Our sprinklers go off twice a day in the summer and once a day in the cooler months for about five minutes at a time.

No more watering by hand! We finally get to sleep in!

Score!