Sprinkler Wars

We have been working on the sprinkler system. When I say “we”, you should all think in your heads, “Andre”. We (both of us) hate our sprinkler system. We have never had one that worked. Thus we have never had green grass.

In our last house there were no sprinklers on one complete side of the house that was covered with grass. There were also no sprinklers in the park strip. We spent 4 or 5 nights of the week watering those areas, manually moving sprinklers. That is fine if you don’t have a sprinkling system. But we had a system. It was just lame. There were other issues with the system but I don’t want to go into it right now.

When we were looking for a new house, a sprinkling system that works was in the top 10 things we were looking for in a house. We did not get that.

In the inspection that we had before we bought the house, we discovered that the system did not work. We let her know that there were a few things that she had to do before we would buy her house. One of those was to fix the sprinkler system. She responded a week later that it was working now.

It wasn’t.

So now we have 3 of the 8 stations that don’t turn on automatically, so we (Andre) have to go out and push the buttons to get each station started. Yes, that is better than dragging a sprinkler attached to a hose around the yard- but not much. We also have to turn the outside water off every night after we water the lawn. If not, one of the stations continually seeps water out of the sprinkler heads.

Last fall we had a neighbor come over and check out our system. He is a plumber who also does appliances, sprinkler systems, and all things that have to do with water. We had a lot of water issues last fall. He is great- but he is not a free neighbor. We pay him. It is SO worth it- in my opinion. He found multiple issues but was not able to fix it because it turned into winter before he could. So this spring we turned on our water and tried out the sprinklers and found lots of new problems.

The major issue is the two broken pipes. The back yard pipe is the station that seeps water continually so it was probably filled with water during the 4 months of -25 degree weather we had this winter.

As Andre was digging one of the pipes, he found that the entire pipe was shattered. It was about 9 feet of shattered pipe. After digging in tons of huge roots and rocks (yes I read your blog and sympathized with you, trench digger brother) and finally getting both areas all fixed, we tested them.

Front yard pipe works great! The pipe that was fixed in the back yard was great! We just have another pipe right next to it that is leaking now. We have to fix the pipes before the neighbor can come and fix the system. We (Andre) don’t have unlimited time to spend on our lame sprinklers. We have other important things to do. Like play Yu-Gi-Oh cards with Jaxon. It takes us a while, and multiple trips to Lowes to get these jobs finished. So maybe by June we can get “the system” working.

I am sure there will be an update after our neighbor comes and tells us about all the problems we have that we don’t know about.