Sprinkler Woes

Yesterday afternoon, I set out with a shovel to find out which one of the irrigation pipes it was that had decided to go plooie. It only took having the irrigation lines on for about five minutes before it became very obvious where I needed to start digging. Several hours later (and with Shauna’s extensive assistance), we had the following in our yard:

Yep, that's me working on the busted sprinkler line.

This wasn’t the end of it either. there’s still hairline cracks going in either direction, though only on the line going to the backyard. Most of the damage seems to have been in that corner. Just look at how the pipes cracked:

It was so bad that it cracked the elbow joint.

With how bad it’s been so far, we’re left wondering if we can finish this by ourselves (and give our thirsty yard some reprieve very soon) or if we should call in a professional. Shauna’s interim solution is to get a cheap sprinkler and hook it up to the hose in the meantime. While researching out options, we learned that we might avoid more issues if we consider installing a water softener systems.

There’s a silver lining to this thunderhead. See the wires in the first picture? Those wires lead to the backyard sprinkler valves. Last summer, we had been manually turning those on and off. Now I’ve realized that we’ve had wires running there the entire time and I just hadn’t known to hook them up. At least there’s some small consolation at the end.

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1 Response

  1. Bill Fox says:

    A month ago I backed out of my driveway to see a lot of water coming out of the ground near the water main. I was on my way out of town for 3 days. I called the water company. They came out and told me over the phone that it was my problem. I had my wife call a plumber. He came out and fixed it but left me with a $975 bill. When I got back home I went out to see what he had done. Since he hadn’t even bothered to cover up the repair, I was able to see exactly what he had done. There was a 8″ piece of 1″ plastic pipe spliced in with 2 couplers. I went bullistic. I decided to give the plumbing company a chance to make it right before I took out a 1 page ad in our local paper. (that would have been expensive). The owner got back to me and said the worker had no experience in estimating and the job should have been $175 and that he would credit the difference to my credit card. although I accepted his offer graciously in my mind I was thinking you guys were tring to screw with the wrong guy.

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