a busted sprinkler pipe and a nifty pvc cap.
jenn pan
so, this happened last night:
james noticed that one of our sprinkler heads was a bit crooked, so he removed it and we discovered a broken pipe! so as not create a small pond in our front yard, we went to home depot this afternoon to look for a temporary solution. temporary, because we'll not only be replacing this stretch of pipe, but extending it into another portion of the yard.
down the rabbit hole we go....
so above is the initial broken bit - you can see the pvc pipe broke off inside the elbow joint. after a bit of digging, we discovered the coupling off the main sprinkler line (we may have had to "break" off a bit more pipe to get to this point), and this is where we made our cut!
after cleaning off the freshly cut end of the pvc pipe, we used this nifty pvc "lock" end cap that we purchased (thank you plumbing aisle guy for pointing us to this! we had other crazy ideas...).
and voila! james turned the sprinklers back on and no leakage! this all took about fifteen minutes. whew! we are very glad this was a terminal sprinkler and that a temporary solution was so easy.
the more permanent solution is a bit more involved. i even made a graphic to illustrate! we have a bit of a "dead zone" in our yard, an area where the sprinklers don't really saturate, and the ground is rather dry, and the grass is rather dead. below, you can see the plan. once we get a replacement sprinkler head, we will also be T-ing another pipe off of it, into the dead zone, and install an additional sprinkler head there. this might not necessarily be the best plan (extending the terminal back towards the source, rather than extending from one closer to the source), but we'll see what happens.
james noticed that one of our sprinkler heads was a bit crooked, so he removed it and we discovered a broken pipe! so as not create a small pond in our front yard, we went to home depot this afternoon to look for a temporary solution. temporary, because we'll not only be replacing this stretch of pipe, but extending it into another portion of the yard.
down the rabbit hole we go....
so above is the initial broken bit - you can see the pvc pipe broke off inside the elbow joint. after a bit of digging, we discovered the coupling off the main sprinkler line (we may have had to "break" off a bit more pipe to get to this point), and this is where we made our cut!
after cleaning off the freshly cut end of the pvc pipe, we used this nifty pvc "lock" end cap that we purchased (thank you plumbing aisle guy for pointing us to this! we had other crazy ideas...).
and voila! james turned the sprinklers back on and no leakage! this all took about fifteen minutes. whew! we are very glad this was a terminal sprinkler and that a temporary solution was so easy.
the more permanent solution is a bit more involved. i even made a graphic to illustrate! we have a bit of a "dead zone" in our yard, an area where the sprinklers don't really saturate, and the ground is rather dry, and the grass is rather dead. below, you can see the plan. once we get a replacement sprinkler head, we will also be T-ing another pipe off of it, into the dead zone, and install an additional sprinkler head there. this might not necessarily be the best plan (extending the terminal back towards the source, rather than extending from one closer to the source), but we'll see what happens.