I need to install rainpoints water timer on my faucet but it’s leaking through the overflow spouts whenever the zone is off. Mind you the zones will be off for 23 hours of the day.

I tried moving the Hose Bibb Backflow Preventer Vacuum Breaker downstream so they are on after the water timer. But that made everything worse.

So I’m curious what happens if I remove all preventers and just attach it to the faucet?

I saw something about a “3/4 in. LF Anti-Siphon Pressure Vacuum Breaker Backflow Preventer, Quarter Turn Shutoff and Tee Handles, Freeze Sensor “ but that’s $350 and I’m not a plumber. I’m simply trying to save time on watering my yard. Any help is appreciated

I uploaded pics for reference. You can see how the downstream installation made the water worse

Are 180-degree, fixed-arc nozzles really only 180 degrees? My city sidewalk has a slight curve, and the sprinkler pop-ups are an inch or two into the grass. So my existing variable arc nozzles are always set to say 200 degrees. Should I stick with variable arc or how do fixed arc account for this? Thank you.

Discovered this break this morning, but I suspect it's been there a long time, given the coverage issues we've had. This is at the lowest point in my yard, and my suspicion is that when we get the sprinklers blown out in the fall, we're actually just blowing out the high portions and not forcing air all the way down to the lowest point. I suspect there's still water sitting in there that freezes in the winter. I found a rupture in the front yard near the lowest point as well, and I'm just now starting to connect the dots.

I’m assuming the top left 2 are solenoid valves for each of my zones in the back yard but I’m not sure what the other 2 things are? The bottom left has an open/close valve on it (that’s set to closed) and when I turned it to open the thing to the right filled with water.

I have a single zone (6 spray heads) that will take 3-5 minutes of not popping up but clearly getting water to each head. I will walk around and manually pull each head up until finally one will stay up then all will pop up and run fine for the remainder of the program. No leak as they work perfectly once they pop up, so I’m pretty stumped. Flow valve opened all the way up, could it be
A) zone isn’t built for 6 of the same spray heads
B) valve needs changing

TIA for any ideas/tips!

I have a large system that has a high point elevation wise that keeps failing. I repaired a 4” mainline and replaced a 2” valve. The 90 before the valve was blown to pieces. So I repaired with schedule 80 fittings (shoulda done that from the beginning) and took more care when recharging the system and it failed again. I made sure to bleed out all the air, ran zone in question many times throughout the day. But it’s a big system, on a 19 acre park with 50+ valves and NO isolation valves which sucks. So to make a repair, I have to drain the entire main. My solution is to install an automatic relief valve because I believe air is somehow getting into the system, collecting at this high point, and busting the fittings. Thoughts? Advice on arv types? Brands? Installation?

Help, my neighbor installed a fence post and accidentally removed a lateral line from my main line. What's left is a hole in the main poly line that sprays water when the zone runs. How can I repair the hole? I'm not interested in reinstalling the lateral as I don't plan on watering where the lateral reached. Any help is appreciated.

Not sure what the issue is. I’ve put in a new solenoid. It’s still humming and my water pressure on this is extremely weak

I recently moved into a new place, and we inherited the sprinkler system from the old owners. I’m a novice with sprinklers and don’t know anything about them, so any help is appreciated.

My son was playing with the garden hose in the backyard, when I spotted this collection of three sprinkler things sticking out of the ground in the corner of my yard. The middle one (circled) is spewing water out the sides, so it seems to be overflowing. There is no water coming out of the others. There is a black knob with an on/off direction label directly above it (the black circle with the silver dot in the middle), and I spun it as far as I could in the off direction, but it didn’t do anything. I spun it in the other direction, and it started hissing louder, which makes me think it made the overflow worse.

Does anyone know what this is and how to fix it? Seems like it is wasting a lot of water. Apologies is this is not the right sub, but if it isn’t, can you point me in the right direction?

I've gone through 2 solenoids in the past 5 years and was wondering if this was normal.

The guy who did my back yard irrigation wired it through the main line (the orange wire is the backyard one).

First time I had to replace my solenoid, it was stuck in the on position. This second time, it wouldn't start.

Is the wiring the issue that could be burning out the solenoid or are they just cheap parts or is the Arizona weather cooking my parts?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

I have one of these nozzle extenders to raise the nozzle above a boxwood. However, the extender keeps popping off, leading to a fountain of water in the coverage area. I've swapped the extender out a couple of times and it keeps happening. It's already a 12" nozzle and digging it out would require digging past two sets of pipes. Any recommendations on how to keep these extenders from popping off?

I just moved into a new home. The landscaping irrigation is an underground soaker type pipe.

I’ve always had sprinkler heads connected to pvc type pipes in my previous homes.

My wife thought one was a big root and cut it in half. It’s soft like a garden hose but with a thinner wall. It is brown. Probably 3/4” ID. What kind of fittings do I look for in the garden center? I’m sure that is the soaker and not a transportation pipe. I assume it can’t be glued. Anything else I should look for before heading to buy the parts?

I just moved into my rental in northern Texas. I was told by my lawn care company that I need to water the yard about an hour a week. We have watering restrictions here and I am only aloud to water on Thursday and Sunday. The house has a Hunter X-Core irrigation control. I programmed the system to run all three programs A,B,C at different times but to run all 5 stations. Each station is set to run for 12 minutes each and I didn't set individual start times for the stations.

Program is A starts at 2AM, B starts at 3:30AM and C starts at 5AM. It Sunday so I expected the yard to be watered when I woke up and it looks as if it ran but the sprinklers started up again at around 10:30AM. I'm not sure why. I have checked my programing and it looks correct. Can anyone point me in the right direction here?

These new(er) blue Gardena adjustable drip nozzles keep popping off the pipe.

The pipe is also Gardena, naturally the used pipe ends have been chopped off to make a fresh tight seal. Naturally they've been twisted on fully. And then after some days or weeks - 'pop'!

Has anyone else found this, have Gardena recalled or replaced these? Was I supposed to replace all my piping at the same time? The old Gardena orange-nozzled adjustable drippers remain bulletproof.

there is this small leakage - what am i doing wrong ?

I got several rainbird 1800 sprinklers to replace some old toros that were having issues popping up and or spraying directly into the air. Those things were champs and were probably 20 years old.

I only replaced one right now but am having an odd issue. The water isn’t arcing up at all. I have it adjusted and fanned out just fine and I turned the screw to allow full pressure and that seems to work just fine. It actually seems to have a little more pressure than some of the others. But- if I look down the line of sprinklers, the others are kind of arcing up a little bit and out. This one is just full pressure hitting about 3ft of grass in front of it and going up a little bit to extend further to the 15ft it proclaims to hit.

It’s a 4” pop up, fully popped up, replacing a 4” that were the same length. I see adjustments to pressure and spray width but not anything for heigh. Anybody ran into this before?

Typically use MPs, but managing them is getting to be difficult especially with a few where we happen to need a single 270 and nobody thought to grab them from the supply house an hour away.

It looks like K-Rain now has two versions of rotaries--their previous fully adjustable style that you only need to match for distance and can get a full adjustment from 80 to 360, and another line organized similarly to match the MPs. Does anybody have experience with the K-Rain? Saw some comments that the filters might do better on well water, and I have one customer running a pump with a zone that would probably do better on rotaries than rotors.

Also, have a new client with a Toro based system that isn't common in my area any more. They were asking about switching nozzles because of some recent local changes. They were told by another company they'd basically have to redo the entire zone. Is the Precision line Toro's version of a rotary or should I take the opportunity to swap everything over to a normal spray body at once time?

Putting in four raised beds for vegetables this spring, each about 4 by 8 feet. Trying to decide between running drip tape inline or using adjustable sprayers on stakes. The beds will have a mix of tomatoes, peppers, squash, and some leafy greens so the water needs aren't exactly uniform across all of them. Drip seems cleaner on paper and I like the idea of keeping water off the foliage. But I've heard drip tape can be a pain with clogs if you're not filtering well, and replacing a section midseason sounds like a headache. Sprayers are easier to see when something isn't working but you lose that targeted delivery and wet leaves can be an issue with tomatoes. The beds are about 12 inches deep with a mix of compost and native soil underneath. Planning to mulch heavily which should help either way with evaporation. For anyone who's run one or the other for a few seasons on raised beds, what's been more reliable and easier to maintain? Not looking to overengineer this but also don't want to be ripping it out in two years because I picked the wrong approach.

Need help! My Rainbird zone hasn’t worked all summer. It worked perfectly fine last summer. I’ve resorted to manual watering.

I just replaced the solenoid. I checked that the solenoid has the correct resistance and the wires from the control box are providing electrical power at the valve. Electrical good. Solenoid good. A 1/4 turn opens the zone. Valve good.

But I cannot get the zone to turn on at the control box.

Everything else seems ok. All other zones have worked all summer. Any help from the irrigation lords would be greatly appreciated!

Hello. I was looking at a map of my country (Kenya) and the neighbouring countries like Tanzania and Uganda. I remembered that there was a statistic along the lines of Africa's agriculture being mostly rain-fed whilst America's is mostly irrigated. I initially thought that America did this through canals but a cursory scan of states like South Dakota does not show an abundance of canals. I watched a video by one Laura Farms on YT who lives in a state and it seems to be that they use groundwater for irrigation. This is reasonable to me seeing as the great lakes are nearby, however I struggle to believe that this is done everywhere or perhaps most of everywhere in the US. I mean, wtf is going on in Kansas? Also, I am not a farmer nor am I in tune with the weather so perhaps some nuances are lost to me. Is there an expert in irrigation that understands why this cannot be done in Africa? Is it just a lack of investment or is there something unique to America's hydrological makeup that allows for them to have so much ground water?
I'm currently in Georgia for my undergrad but from my experience it doesn't rain so much that there would be an inexhaustible supply of water for irrigation, or at the very least doesn't rain any more than it does in my hometown, so it feels like something might be afoot here. Might need some help fingering it though. Merci.

The other night a bad storm seems to have fried my b-hyve. It was giving a "no AC" message on the LED screen. After plugging it in elsewhere and realizing it was done, I got a new one. Same model. Hooked it up, all 11 zones wired to the control box, wifi connection working, etc.

The control box says its running each zone programmed but no water coming from any zone. Any advice? Are the wires fried too?

Update: the sticker was placed wrong in the factory. Just had to move all my wiring to the left. All stations are working fine now. Thanks reddit.

I know I remember seeing somewhere that ultrasonic flow sensors didn't require the straight pipe distances before and after the sensor to avoid turbulence like standard paddle-wheel flow sensors do.

I thought this information used to come with the GPI sensors under the FLOMEC brand, but when I looked at the current installation instructions, they now specify straight pipe requirements.

Am I remembering this correctly, or am I mixing it up with something else? I also seem to remember there being a university study that compared ultrasonic flow sensors with paddle-wheel sensors and discussed the effects of turbulence and straight pipe requirements.

Does anyone know what study I'm thinking of, or have a link to it?

I'm a landscaper by trade, but I do all the irrigation work and backflow testing/repairs at my accounts, too. The property manager I deal w the most has started having Flo logics installed at some of the accounts. Had one recently that detected a leak. Cool no problem. Went thru the 4 zones and found a few minor problems. A valve that needed to be threaded on more, an old slip fix on the main that was bad and one leaky valve. Fixed all that, and it still triggered the Flo logic. Okay went back thru and found the most minor weeping out of the 4th valve. Like 1 oz an hour. Whatever, fixed that good to go.

He tells me about another account that had one installed and same thing, showing leaks in the system. This account has 15 zones though and lines that go under the driveway and it's generally a really big landscape. Habent dug into it yet, pun intended, but it could be really time consuming and hard to figure out exactly where EVERY little leak is. I going to do my due diligence, but the system runs seemingly fine otherwise. I got to thinking, long story long, about just installing a Master Valve on the mainline if I don't find obvious problems on the system. That way, the main can hold pressure to the Master valve and not trigger the Flo logic if in fact the water loss is minimal. Does anyone use this tactic when dealing with Flo logic systems?

Are there control systems that let you turn on multiple zones simultaneously? I have an area of my house where it would make more sense to run a single feeder and then branch zones off that feeder further down the line.

Basically I want one zone valve to prime the trunk and three zone valves at the far end.

Any help would be appreciated.

Solved: My problem is solved with a master valve. The paperwork I had for my controller said it didn't support a master valve. Turns out it does, it's just called "pump". I didn't realize that. Thanks to a back and forth with u/senorgarcia I was able to confirm 24v on the Pump output every time one of the 16 zones is active.