a sprinkler and drip system story (and beginner tutorial)
When warm weather starts and the rain subsides, it is time to check the sprinkler systems! Since my husband and I decided to divvy up the yard work, I decided to learn all the important stuff for myself. I am in charge of the front yard and he is in charge of the back yard. And the battle begins. So, I figured out how to turn on the sprinklers and this is what I got:
Holey Mackerel!! Is anything getting wet besides the fence? Under further investigation there are loads of bare black pipes, missing drippers and sprinklers and chewed up pieces on the ground. I wonder how that happened??
Cute little puppies get bigger and so does the chewing!
My sweet black lab "George" ripped up all the irrigation in the back yard and getting a new puppy didn't help things much!
I went to Home Depot and picked up some tubing and some drippers and some sprinklers. Easy! I got home and tried fixing the leaks, reburied the hoses and realized the problems were bigger than I thought. The ground was soaked where I had just fixed the hoses. Bad fitting hoses! Old tubing and cracked fittings! By my third trip to Home Depot I just stood there in the plumbing aisle and decided to just start over. I talked to a guy staring at the equipment with the same blank look I had and told him "I have no idea what I'm doing - I'm learning by failure!" He laughed and said he was doing the same thing!
I bought large black tubing, small black tubing, little black bubblers, spikes to attach the big hose to the little hose and a few sprinklers. I recently learned to light the BBQ grill and can start the leaf blower now - I can do this.
I ripped up all the old tubing and foot by foot, put in new big tubing, new small tubing, and new bubblers for each plant. I got to a place in the yard where the tubing went behind a bunch of bushes and not conducive to me crawling on my knees to bury new pipe. I decided to connect my new pipe to the old pipe for that 30 foot stretch. The old pipe was too small to fit right into the new pipe.
That's when I figured out that there were at least two sizes of big black pipe......I had bought 3/4 inch and the old pipe was 1/2 inch. OMG, no wonder there were so many people wandering around in the plumbing isle at Home Depot!
