Lawn Sprinkler Installation for Dummies

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Think of the water moving through your sprinkler system as millions of water droplets, rather than a single mass of water. On it’s journey through your sprinkler system a single drop of water will loose pressure along the way. Each place where it will lose pressure is one of the items that is listed on your pressure loss table.


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Then it will proceed through the meter into the house supply pipe and on to the irrigation system connection. From there our drop goes into the irrigation system and may pass through a backflow preventer. Onward it travels to the sprinkler zone control valve and through that valve into the lateral pipes leading to the sprinkler heads. lawn sprinkler installation.


Note that our droplet only passes through one sprinkler head on the way to the lawn. I’ll bet you’ve never seen water on the lawn jumping back into the sprinkler head so it can go back and try going out through another sprinkler! So it only passes through one sprinkler head - auto watering system.


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(O.K. wise guy, yes I have seen water sucked back into a sprinkler head. But that’s not supposed to happen, it means something is wrong with the sprinkler system.) At any rate, even if you still don’t understand why you use the pressure loss for only a single sprinkler, please trust me, it’s correct! I’ve been doing this sprinkler design stuff for over 35 years and have designed thousands of systems.


Plus it is used by dozens of colleges as an irrigation design text. Much more information on sprinkler selection is coming later in the tutorial, such as detailed information on the spacing to use between sprinklers and nozzle selection. If you want to jump ahead and check it out, click here.


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In most cases they are not suitable for lawn irrigation and are used for watering shrubs or sometimes groundcovers. They are most often used to water smaller areas where sprinklers would overspray water out of the area, although there are other specialty uses for them. For example, I often use near floor to ceiling windows where I don’t want water spray to drift onto the windows.


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Some sprinkler manufacturers make “bubbler nozzles” that fit onto their standard spray-type shrub style or pop-up sprinkler bodies. The classic bubbler is simply screwed directly onto the end of a 1/2″ pipe. The difference between a bubbler and a drip emitter is flow rate. Drip emitters flow at very low rates, most often 4 gallons per hour (16 liters/hour*) or less.


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Bubblers flow at higher rates, often measured in gallons per minute rather than hour, and the intent of a bubbler is to flood the ground surface with water. (*A little optional puzzle for you. Q. If you do the math 4 gallons rounds to 15 liters, so why did I say 16? A.


They are designed using liters, so in reality it is a 16 l/h emitter, not a 4 gph emitter. 16 liters rounds to 4 gallons, while 4 gallons rounds to 15 liters. It’s a rounding error issue caused by the unit values rather than bad math. OK, enough fun for the geeks.) Normally bubblers are separated onto a valve circuit of their own so that the watering time can be fine-tuned for exactly how long it takes to flood the desired areas with water.


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Installing bubblers on the same zone wtih spray -type sprinklers is not the most efficient way to go, but as long as it is only 2 or 3 bubblers and they are watering a very small area (not more than 3′ square per bubbler) you can generally play with the bubbler’s flow adjustments and get a reasonably workable watering balance.


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Placing bubblers on the same valve zone with rotors or drip irrigation seldom works out well. Do not combine bubblers on the same zone with lawn sprinklers. There are a number of different types of bubblers available, so let’s start by attempting to group them into some loose categories. Flood bubblers do just what the name implies, they flood the area around them with water.


The are by far the most common type found, and are what most people think of if they are familiar with bubblers. An adjustable flood bubbler is essentially just a small water valve. It typically has a screw or knob that is used to adjust how much water flows out of it.


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The amount of area they will water is very hard to predict, it depends on how far open the valve is (how much water is coming out), how long it is left on, and the soil type. For purposes of planning your irrigation system, I have found that in most situations flood bubblers will water an area about 3 feet in radius, at a flow of 2 GPM (auto watering system).




If the area is wider than 3′ I will install a second row of bubblers. Again, bubblers tend to be very hard to predict, you may find you can water a much wider area with a single row, or if you have sandy soil you may have difficulty getting the area flooded with them 3′ apart! are just that, non-adjustable.


The result is wasting water by watering areas with no plants which encourages weed growth. Drip Irrigation on the other hand delivers water right to the roots of the plant thereby eliminating water waste, and stifling weed growth as there is no excess water on the soil for weeds to utilize.

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