As I noted in the recent post offering an early spring yard update, I've returned my attentions to the promise and possibilities of the irrigation system. As the summer of 2020 wrapped up, I had installed all the main water lines, routed and valved and wired all the zones, connected to the smart automation system, and had functioning sprinklers for the front and back yards, plus three new yard hydrants. But I did not get very far with taking the dripline zones for the flower and shrub planting areas beyond their water source tap points...almost all of which were screw-capped and waiting for the necessary components—and the homeowner's initiative!—to achieve usable expansion. That finally began with adding flow regulator/filter components to set up those feed lines to feed some lines, and then I moved into the learn-from-your-mistakes mode as I sampled different approaches to achieve the "final mile" of getting irrigation to individual plants within those beds.
As we approached the end of the first week of April, I finally consolidated all my lists and notes in order to work up orders for the next set of components required for building out and/or maintaining the system. Those orders went to SprinklerWarehouse.com and DripDepot.com on Maundy Thursday evening.
The larger order came first, from Sprinkler Warehouse. It spurred me to spread all my assorted boxes of irrigation system components, tools, fittings, and equipment out in the bright but chilly sunshine on Easter Monday and get things better organized and separated. I'm definitely going to find it easier to operate during these expansion and establishment efforts to fully operationalize the system.
I've managed thus far to stay relatively undiscouraged by some of my stumbles as I have returned to this overall project. In one planting bed, the renewed effort led me to jiggle loose a weak coupling in the zone's supply line, so I had to dig down (to that marvelous deep level I'd buried these!) to uncover the issue and effect a repair.
It’s the unforced errors that are plaguing me as I work on what ought to have been a small and relatively simple fix. A failure to measure twice in one instance, and an ill-sequenced set of steps when preparing to test the repairs in another—that’s how I got off-track and why it took several days to finish this part of the season’s tasks.
A quick run to Lowe’s could not be avoided, and on April's first Sunday evening I finished the last repairs. A test run of the system Monday showed it was ready for prime time, with a small exception: one of the front porch planters seemed to have a lot of water dripping out.
Might I have broken one of the tiny feeder lines or a fitting within that elaborate configuration? The only way to know was to transplant the pansies elsewhere and remove all the potting soil. What seemed the most likely explanation was poor soil settling and too large a drain hole at the bottom. Once I’d reworked the soil and planted new petunias, that planter’s drip line worked fine.
Yesterday, I focused on the dripline servicing the perimeter of The Grove, attaching to the converter at the underground zone's endpoint, looping past a camelia and a couple of azaleas...
...and running along the wall to cut over to the third of my mother's planters as well as the sloppy-built planter I made myself back in 2012.
This is putting me quite a bit closer to having all the flower beds in the front part of the yard incorporated into the automatic watering zones, which can be scheduled or app-activated, thanks to my Rachio smart controller.
It is all too often here that I comment favorably about the largely successful large undertaking of building my own full-yard irrigation system. (I hope readers do not suffer from irrigation irritation!) For it to thus far appear to be problem-free and functional does remain a marvel to me, a novice with a limited skill set. It was neither shock nor disappointment to find on the system’s first test that I had overlooked gluing (well, technically, it is cement) one part of one of the valve manifolds I’d built. Just to contemplate the overall number of cemented junctions of all the lines, creating the intricate tight arrangement of the two valve manifolds, running the wires to automate those valves…so many ways for it to go awry and yet here we are instead in a persistent state of satisfaction—which I hope does not too closely resemble self-satisfaction.
Smart automation, seven wired valves, all the lines and couplings and sprinklers and yard hydrants...the one recent leak when I jiggled loose a weak joint is, in retrospect, not surprising. I am remembering a struggle at that spot because I made a later decision about extending watering access to the two small front flower beds on either side of the front steps—those coupling points were a strain and a pain to pull off. I’m glad it revealed itself and that it was easy enough to dig down to.
What is surprising is that the only real issues have emerged not from what the bumbling amateur did, but from the professional plumbing company hired for what I could not do: installation of a second city water meter dedicated to irrigation, and adding the mandatory backflow preventer at the front end of the system. It’s taken three tries for them to eliminate leaking from the meter connection in the front sidewalk, and they failed when inspecting their own backflow preventer the year after it was installed.
It was with small apprehension, then, that I greeted the arrival of one of the Pf Plumbing team members this past Thursday, there to do the annual inspection of the backflow preventer...heightened a bit when I realized it was the same guy who may have done the small damage that caused it to initially fail last year. But it all went smoothly and we are good to go for another year.
Look: the folks I have dealt with from Pf Plumbing have been great. They’ve been responsive to my calls to fix these messes. But lordy: I’m not sure how to feel about our respective win-loss records thus far, at least here at the Roediger House. My parts of the system have certainly outperformed theirs!
