Poor man's irrigation system?

The place to discuss irrigation systems, sprinkers and watering
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HoosierLawnGnome
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Re: Poor man's irrigation system?

Post by HoosierLawnGnome » August 3rd, 2019, 8:54 am

schreibdave wrote:
August 3rd, 2019, 7:08 am
Another option I think I like better than those above ... if my sprinkler head is downhill of my water source, I should be able to unscrew the sprinkler head from the body and use my shop vac to suck the collected water out. Maybe have the compressor (or another shop vac) blow from one end while I suck from the other. I think I will make that the plan and see how it works.
Just blow it out with your compressor. No need to shop vac it out.

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Re: Poor man's irrigation system?

Post by andy10917 » August 3rd, 2019, 9:12 am

Did you do anything for backflow prevention?

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Re: Poor man's irrigation system?

Post by schreibdave » August 3rd, 2019, 3:09 pm

andy10917 wrote:
August 3rd, 2019, 9:12 am
Did you do anything for backflow prevention?
At the hose bib is an orbit 4 valve timer. When the spigot is open and the valve is closed I would think that the valve would serve as a back flow preventer.

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Re: Poor man's irrigation system?

Post by schreibdave » July 11th, 2020, 9:19 am

Someone asked me a question about my Frankenstein irrigation system on another thread and rather than hijack that thread, I thought I should update this one from last year.

As background, this is a new house with about 12,000 sqft of lawn. It was built with 2 spigots. I planted a temporary lawn of PR in the spring of 2017 when we moved in. I knew that I would eventually renovate that to kbg. When I started planning my reno last year I was thinking about how I would irrigate it during germination so I experimented with lots of hose, splitters and assorted hose-end sprinklers. I quickly realized that I didn't have enough spigots in the right places to do this most efficiently so I spent a weekend adding 3 new spigots. This was quite easy BTW with pex and an unfinished section of basement.

Once I had my new spigots installed, I went back to laying out my miles of hose and sprinklers. Then it occured to me that I could bury the hose under mulch where it crossed the mulch beds so that I wouldn't have the unsightly hoses in the beds. So I did that in a few places and my plan was to simply run hose to hose-end sprinklers attached to a timer and call it a day. But then I wasn't happy with the areas where I was running hose across the lawn. So I was going to bury the hose under a couple inches of soil. I was renovating anyway, so a shallow trench or two wasn't that big of a deal. I would bury my hose and then have it pop out of the ground and attach to a sprinkler. Then someone here pointed out that my hose would eventually collapse from the weight of the soil above. And of course I would still have the issue of short lengths of hose attached to hose-end sprinklers that I would have to mow around. That seemed ugly and a PITA.

Around the same time I was having a hard time finding quality impact sprinklers that wouldn't get stuck all the time. I wasted a bunch of time and money trying to find hose end sprinklers that I was happy with. Then it occured to me that I could try some pro pop up sprinklers mounted on spikes. I knew that they were more reliable so I rigged up a Rainbird 5000 sprinkler head attached to the spike base from my crappy hose end sprinklers. This worked ok but was of course pretty goofy. So then I decided that I should scrap the spike and just bury the Rainbird in the ground and attach it to my buried hose.

That worked ok and in fact I have 3 runs now that use hose attached to Rainbird pop ups. These runs are all buried in mulch beds and so long as they work I will leave them alone. But burying hose under soil to get to my Rainbird head still presented the problem of hose that will eventually collapse. This led me to explore using a more reliable type of underground hose or pipe so I went to my local Site One (used to to be John Deere Landscaping and then Lesco). They service professional landscape and irrigation guys. They really aren't set up for clueless homeowners with dumb ideas. Their only appropriate product was 1" poly pipe in 300 ft rolls. So I explored that a little. I was already thinking I would use pro pop up heads. Now I was using pro PVC pipe. All I needed were the pro connectors and I would be all set.

At this point mission creep has dragged me a long long way from what I had originally intended but I figured that digging trenches was the hardest part of the job and if I was going to do that anyway I might as well put reliable pipe in the trench. The only detail to figure out was how to connect my pvc pipe to my Orbit timers. This ended up being the hardest part to figure out because connecting a HD bought Orbit timer to Site One bought 1" PVC isn't something that pros do so I had to cobb together a series of connectors to go from 1" down to hose diameter and from pipe thread to garden hose thread. I did eventually figure that out but only after wasting a bunch of time and money.

This system worked well enough last year that I expanded it this spring to my south side yard and most of my back yard. I am renovating the back next month and I do need to add 3 more heads along the property line.

At the moment I have 4 timers attached to 4 spigots. Each timer has 4 outlets. Of the 16 total outlets I use 14 of them to run 17 heads. In a couple of places I am able to run 2 heads per zone but that's the exception. I learned to test those multi head runs before I bury them.

Last fall I winterized the system by blowing a shop vac into one end of the pipe while simultaneously sucking with a shop van on the other end. That worked well enough. I bringing the timers inside for the winter.

Here are some pictures of my spigot to timer set up:

This connects the 1" PVC to a piece of hose which then connects to the timer.
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Re: Poor man's irrigation system?

Post by schreibdave » July 11th, 2020, 9:22 am

Some pictures of my trenches. For the most part they were only 5-6" deep.

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Re: Poor man's irrigation system?

Post by schreibdave » July 11th, 2020, 9:25 am

Two of the heads in action plus a picture of the various hoses and fittings that connect the head to the timer. But some of the fitting on the timer side are missing because I don't have any laying around.

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Re: Poor man's irrigation system?

Post by schreibdave » July 11th, 2020, 9:27 am

Some pictures from this morning. You don't realize how good it looks when you can't see my neighbors. They are all brown. This kbg will turn one year old next month.

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Re: Poor man's irrigation system?

Post by southern-ct-4 » July 11th, 2020, 10:04 am

That's awesome and thanks so much for the detailed info/explanation! I'll definitely have to think this over...

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Re: Poor man's irrigation system?

Post by schreibdave » July 11th, 2020, 11:19 am

No problem. None of it is hard but all together it's a chose. If you can dig a trench, turn a wrench and drive back and forth to the hardware store a million times you can do it. And it's really not that expensive. Half my expense was in implementing strategies that I ultimately abandoned. For example, I bought hundreds of feet of hose and sprinklers that I don't use.

The fittings all add up but if you can find them at HD/Lowes or your hardware store they are a lot cheaper than at Site One. Andy posted a link to an on-line irrigation supply house that sells the sprinklers for something like $6 each. The 1" poly was about $100 for 300ft at Site One. The funny pipe was maybe $30 for 50ft?? The Orbit timers were $50 each at HD. So depending on what size area you are doing, it doesn't have to be that expensive.

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Re: Poor man's irrigation system?

Post by northeastlawn » July 13th, 2020, 1:50 pm

I don’t think I ever thanked you, but this spring during the COVID lock down I installed 1’ poly pipe and fed it with my hose bib. The poly pipe was buried in my mulch bed and under my patio pavers, it waters 1,500sf. One zone runs 4 heads, the other 3 heads. It takes me 2hrs to put down 1/2“.

The lawn Gets watered so evenly now, I don’t have those dry spots that would get missed by the oscillating sprinklers.

If I ever feel like my KBG gets thick enough I may switch a head to a different zone and trench through the lawn, but for now in this drought it’s working great, all off a battery powered times and hose bib. Your post and the local guys at site-one inspired me to get mine done.

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Re: Poor man's irrigation system?

Post by southern-ct-4 » July 13th, 2020, 3:56 pm

schreibdave wrote:
July 11th, 2020, 11:19 am
No problem. None of it is hard but all together it's a chose. If you can dig a trench, turn a wrench and drive back and forth to the hardware store a million times you can do it. And it's really not that expensive. Half my expense was in implementing strategies that I ultimately abandoned. For example, I bought hundreds of feet of hose and sprinklers that I don't use.

The fittings all add up but if you can find them at HD/Lowes or your hardware store they are a lot cheaper than at Site One. Andy posted a link to an on-line irrigation supply house that sells the sprinklers for something like $6 each. The 1" poly was about $100 for 300ft at Site One. The funny pipe was maybe $30 for 50ft?? The Orbit timers were $50 each at HD. So depending on what size area you are doing, it doesn't have to be that expensive.
Thanks again and I'm sure I'll have more specific questions as I research this further (if I truly decide to do it). For these prices, money is almost no object, as it's vastly cheaper than a professional system (which I've been quoted upwards of $6k for dozens of sprinklers to cover my 20k sq ft). I'd also likely just do my 10k front yard, or even just part of it, with 4 sprinklers, which should do a good enough job, even if not perfect (although perhaps the pop-up sprinklers don't cover as much as non pop-up rotary sprinklers, but I'd test that out first of course).

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Re: Poor man's irrigation system?

Post by schreibdave » July 13th, 2020, 5:42 pm

northeastlawn wrote:
July 13th, 2020, 1:50 pm
I don’t think I ever thanked you, but this spring during the COVID lock down I installed 1’ poly pipe and fed it with my hose bib. The poly pipe was buried in my mulch bed and under my patio pavers, it waters 1,500sf. One zone runs 4 heads, the other 3 heads. It takes me 2hrs to put down 1/2“.

The lawn Gets watered so evenly now, I don’t have those dry spots that would get missed by the oscillating sprinklers.

If I ever feel like my KBG gets thick enough I may switch a head to a different zone and trench through the lawn, but for now in this drought it’s working great, all off a battery powered times and hose bib. Your post and the local guys at site-one inspired me to get mine done.
That's great! Lets see some pictures!
southern-ct-4 wrote:
July 13th, 2020, 3:56 pm
Thanks again and I'm sure I'll have more specific questions as I research this further (if I truly decide to do it). For these prices, money is almost no object, as it's vastly cheaper than a professional system (which I've been quoted upwards of $6k for dozens of sprinklers to cover my 20k sq ft). I'd also likely just do my 10k front yard, or even just part of it, with 4 sprinklers, which should do a good enough job, even if not perfect (although perhaps the pop-up sprinklers don't cover as much as non pop-up rotary sprinklers, but I'd test that out first of course).
The key for me was that I was doing a renovation and I was going to kill the lawn anyway so trenching wasn't that big of a deal and I really, really needed a way to put down frequent and consistent water to keep my seedlings watered. It started as a plan to bury one garden hose to one far off spot and the project took off from there. Good luck.

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Re: Poor man's irrigation system?

Post by Dchall_San_Antonio » September 1st, 2020, 5:25 pm

One of the things we studied in grad school was the similarities of mechanical, hydraulic, and electrical "spring/mass/damper" systems. Without boring you with the math, what you want is the largest diameter, most rigid pipe you can find. If you can squeeze a piece of pipe with your hands and deform it, go with something more rigid. Hard copper, of course, is rigid but unaffordable for most. Sched 40 PVC is a good second choice. If your poly pipe is soft, I'd really go with PVC. Farmers around here will go with 2.25-inch poly to run water from a cistern to water troughs 1,000 feet away. They don't really care how long it takes to fill the trough, but they would like it to fill today. When they first open the spigot the water barely trickles out, but after an hour it's flowing like a fire hose.
For lawn irrigation, 3/4-inch PVC should be plenty for normal lot sizes. Andy's estate sized lot would see value in the larger diameter.

For those who want to be bored with a bit of the theory...
Large diameter pipe is good because the flow through the pipe is much slower than the flow through smaller pipe. Resistance to flow increases with velocity squared. If you increase the flow rate by 2x, the resistance to flow increases by 4x.
Stiffer pipe is good because the capacitance of the pipe is more favorable. Imagine flowing water through a long balloon versus a metal pipe. The balloon will "suck up" all the flow in the simple expansion of the balloon.

Pivot irrigation systems are interesting to study, because it's all happening above ground. They start with giant diameter pipe which goes through size reduction out to the end. Of course they are taking water out all down the pipe, but they still need to have pressure at the end. If you ever hear loud car motors running at night, it could be a pump for pivot irrigation. Here is a picture of two V8 motors tied together with straight pipes running a pump. Pretty cool.
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Re: Poor man's irrigation system?

Post by DevilDawg81 » September 5th, 2020, 4:26 pm

I find myself in the same boat as you schreibdave. We built last year and only have two outdoor spigots. I have I believe 14 hoses for my 13k reno right now. Next year my hopes are to do the front, and it’s every bit of 15k. I’ve built PVC stands that have Orbit Voyager II heads on them. I’ve started looking into Hunter I-40/90 because I need something that throws water further.

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Re: Poor man's irrigation system?

Post by schreibdave » September 7th, 2020, 7:48 am

I added 3 new spigots. Easy to do with pex. That simplified things a little.

We have low water pressure coming in from the town. About 35 psi. So I had a plumber install a pump to boost pressure to whatever i set it to, which is usually 60 psi or so.

Good luck!

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