Checking for a broken Sprinkler valve

okay today I want to take a minute to show you how to check your sprinkler valve if you think you have a bad valve one of the first signs of that as a homeowner or a renter is if you notice if you have a front lawn or something or a back lawn and you notice one of the sprinklers seems to be dribbling water out at the top of the sprinkler and you've got puddling in your lawn if it's a flat lawn from the lowest sprinkler in the line or if you've got water running down the sidewalk from one of your lawn sprinklers good chance you might have a bad sprinkler valve so on my home here you can see here we've got the water main on the side of the house for the faucet there's this shutoff for the home there's the branch off for the irrigation and you can tell it's irrigation because down here you can see it converts to PVC pipe and there's a sprinkler valves one the front set one the back set so this guy here is a pressure regulator that's on the house and if you ever want to check your water pressure that's another video but I'll show you that at a different time but you hook up a pressure gauge to that closet right there and turn it on it will tell you the water pressure in your house should be around 55 psi here in California anyway one of the quick things that you can do as a homeowner to come out here here's your sprinkler valves if you have Rainbird they look like this these are lawn Jeannie or water master or your hole they all kind of look the same these are really hard to get off these are really easy to check first thing is a homeowner if you don't have any tools you want to check to see which valve is running kind of like a toilet running all the time it's your problem child creating the issue is you want to come over and just lightly with your hand tap the side of the valve several times and we want to hear a rattling noise so that it's going plastic to plastic it's not plastic floating in water that would eliminate that valve as a suspect okay we can also see that we have a lawn valve a lawn valve and a drip valve how we know that strip is it has a filter here and down below it we can't really see too much of it right here as you can see right here below it is the pressure reducer down there so that time we know this valves the drip valve so if it's a long issue you're having it's not going to be this guy it's going to be one of these two if it's your front one if is one of my back ones owns it would be one of those I don't have drip in the back so again that's verified easily enough by seeing no filters or pressure reducers there so again the way I would check initially one of these long valves come up tap it with my hand you can hear it sons rattling so it's dry plastic to plastic either ones the culprit okay so in my house I don't currently have a bad valve at least I'm not aware of that now with the valve turned off so you haven't turned anything on you unscrew the lid here nice and easy a lot of rain birds out get over here we can get a little better shot unscrew it lightly lift it off turn it over and right here inside the cap there's a gasket sitting right in here with my thumbs touching it right now so be careful because if you pick it up and you pick it up off the valve like this and you're not paying attention especially if your bark if that plastic or that rubber washer falls out on the ground you might not notice if you put the lid back on it's go spray water out of it really bad when you turn it back on so again now if I had a valve that was failed here and this was my valve that went that dud so it sounded like it was this plastic piece here it things down I'll show you did they kind of move down so if you look here see how it hang you down so when the valve try to position it so you can see a little bit so you can see it hangs down here right when it's upside down inside the valve and if I push it up you can see how it moves up and down so we're hitting it and rattles that plastic is sitting on this plastic surface around here inside if that plastic surface has water and you can see it has water in the center but the water's all the way to the tippy top and it's overflowing and going out running down your sidewalk then that plastic plunger right there will be sitting in water right here hence when you hit it over thudd thudd thudd you can even feel the pipe down here with your hand and if it's a fairly warm day it'll be cold to the touch again real good cue that it's a problem now one other thing I will bring up if you've got water running pretty heavily down the street and you can actually hear water running pretty well you don't want to take this lid off because if you do probably going to get a face full of water so if that's the case one of the things you want to do here is shut the irrigation all the way to the right so it stops then pull this lid off set it to the side with the washer still in it and then slowly open this up and we're going to watch and see if water fills up in this center chamber here so I can simulate that real quick by turning my valve on and showing you what that would look like if I had a bad back so I see oh if I can do this without soaking myself I'm going to turn it on just a little bit so you can get that Valve to run a little bit and so see how the water is creeping up in the center here and now it's going to start overflowing and there goes okay that's what about this bad would look like so if you're not sure and you come up to your valve you muck the water out at the center chamber with your figure and then you watch and you see it creeping back up there's your bad valve okay so from there you know it's time to go ahead and do a valve replacement but at least for the short term I could if I was a homeowner or a renter and it's paying the water bill I could at least go ahead and shut this guy off leave my house water on up here the shut-off the irrigation water right here until I can get something out to do a repair and once I'm done checking this let's say this was a good velvet - which it was as you saw when we first opened it nice and tight by the way I didn't need a wrench to do that if this was a perfectly good valve and it was dry like when we opened it then you would automatically just move to the next one take the lid off of that check it knock the water out see if it comes back up there's your bad valve okay okay next I'm going to show you the back yard sprinkler valves at my house this is the lid here sometimes these are super hard to get off if they are hard to get off you're gonna have to use a big pair of channel locks to try to turn this and loosen this lid to get it off to check it just like we did with the front yard valve now one thing I will say if you have to use channel locks and you're using leverage with the tool trying to torque that then twist that lid off like that one of the things that's going to happen is if you watch or I'll kind of simulate this I get to the side I'm going to show you this is the action that that torquing is going to cause I don't know if you can see that backyard valve the longer sit real still for sec and kind of see the top of this valve twisting with me it's super hard to see there now but what we're trying to avoid is taking this valve and causing torque like that as we're loosening that lid with a pair of channellocks because that's going to cause one of these two pipes down here to break and if it's the backyard one and the water is on over here you are going to get one heck of a bath before you can get that water shut off so one of the important thing is how we show my employees are of showing a homeowner do you want to take your hand put it in between the sprinkler pipes like this if you can look here see how my hands in here and now I'm putting torque I'm going to push my arm here against the side of the pipe here and my hand here pushing against that way okay towards the fence direction to cause to kind of be the opposite torque to put a little candle lever action on it so that the pipes not wanting to twist like this picture my pipes wanting to do this as I'm trying to torque that lid so if you put your hand in there keeps them from being able to move it'll be as you loosen it up the pipes are like this they barely move like my fingers so we got lucky today we can get this lid off nice and easy so if you see here you just take this lid off set it upside down over here the gasket stayed with it now this doesn't have a pin like the Rainbird valve that stays attached to a with these type of valves have a pin that comes over and it's loose so you have to just take it and it sits take it and put it right back into the center hole drop it in and it's ready to go right back on now if we were tapping our valves like we did in the front this plastic plunger would have been sitting in water I could have thought I had a bad valve because as we can see that's all full of water right now however that's my backyard sprinklers they sit higher than this so when the water is off the water that was being pushed through the center of this valve here coming up in here pushing that up tight against the lid and forcing water down from this center section down that hole over there closest to us and out to the backyard sprinklers well right now with it off that water is flowing back over here and coming up this hole and it's sitting in here so it makes it a little tricky to try to figure out if you've got a bad valve one of the tricks I've learned over the years obviously you can try them up in the water out of here as best you can with your fingers just pushing it up and down please splashing the water out okay let's see and if you can get the water level down enough and sometimes if you wait a second it'll be speed you can kind of see it's really full speed kind of going down down down down down down and then we're not getting it and it's going to come right back up so we're not going to be able to get it so sometimes they take my hand and I put it over this and they create a plunger effect like that's just like you're plunging your tight your toilet and you plunge that water on the outgoing side away from you and then if you check real quick you muck the water out of that center chamber and you can see now water is going to come up real quick and then it's going to go down real quick and then you can see real fast your muck the water out of the center chamber it's going down so I do not have a bad valve okay I'll put that lid back on nice and careful and just thread it on there by hand and it just gently tightens back down just hand tight doesn't need to be super tight and that's how you check your sprinkle valves to see if you got a leak okay and if you do like I said you can always turn the water off one of the next series things I will show you on this video series will be how to replace the sprinkler valve if you're that adventurous

Channel: Gary's Sprinkler Repair

Views: 223,990

Keywords: DIY, checking for bad valve, bad valves, sprinkler, sprinkler valves, bad sprinkler valve, water leaks, fix yourself, broken valve, irrigation, sprinkle, home repairs, irragation, sprinkler controls, high water bill, Irrigation

Id: CxHIW2Hl-HQ

Length: 11min 6sec (666 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 09 2017