About a week ago my mom called about an emergency situation involving her sprinkler system. Over the years mom has transformed her lawn into a beautiful garden complete with walking paths, contemplation stations and all sorts of different shrubbery, plants and flowers. It’s quite the layout. I’d compare it with any arboretum around the DFW area. That being said you can imagine the importance of irrigation. Well the other day one of her zones began loosing lots of water. It was just gushing out from the side deck. The only immediate solution was to turn the zone off. That means no water at all until the leak was fixed. It’s now in the dog days of summer and it is over triple digits. Her plants need water and the only way to do that is to water by hand. That’s a lot of stress. I wasn’t able to make it up to help her out until Tuesday of this week.
Finding the leak
There is a portion of the back yard landscaping that incorporates a wrap around deck. The portion on the side of the house is approximately 5ft by 12ft and was constructed 20 years ago to store the grill. Mom doesn’t use that deck much anymore so it was largely vacant. She thought the leak was close to the fence line since that’s were the water was coming out. I had to pry up a few boards to take a look. The boards closest to the fence were easy to remove and then we turned on the zone to find the source of the leak. Naturally it wasn’t near the fence. It was more towards the middle of the deck and close to the house.
I came to learn that there had been sprinkler heads installed along that wall that dad capped when he built the deck. Clearly one of those capped heads was going to be our problem. As soon as the zone was charged water immediately began bubbling out of the mud. Now that I knew where the source was we turned off the water. Sadly that left standing water under the decking that I had to remove. Finally I was able to get down to the irrigation PVC piping and the leak appeared to be a sheared off riser.
The green riser body can be seen just peaking out of the mud hole above. These risers connect the PVC irrigation pipes that run under ground to the sprinkler head that peaks through the soil. Below is a picture of one of them. The risers are made of some type of plastic that is less durable than the PVC pipe of the irrigation system. I’ve seen these rip along the side or break in half.
The Solution
Fixing the leak was easy. All I did was remove the remining portion of the green riser and replace that with a stronger riser and I added a cap to that closing the leak. You can buy these parts from any hardware store that sells irrigation supplies. I bought mine from Home Depot for less than $3 total.
The reason the riser was left in place originally was so that if the deck was ever removed, it would be relatively easy to find the capped riser and restore that zones sprinkler heads. Plus just capping a zone is much easier that digging up the T intersection, cutting it out and splicing in a new section of PVC pipe. That’s a lot of unnecessary work.
The Conclusion
After recapping the compromised node I buried the setup using dirt I previously dug out and dirt from under the deck. It’s important to cover the pipe so that it doesn’t freeze. Nobody wants to repair a burst irrigation pipe after winter. The remaining work was simply to remove the old nails from the boards I pulled up and reattaching the planks in their original positions. All in all the job was easier than I expected and the results look amazing.
