DIY ABOVE GROUND Sprinkler System (2020 UPDATE!)

so before you know it summer temperatures will be here and you'll need to start thinking about irrigating and watering your lawn and today I want to give you a quick and easy version of my DIY sprinkler that I've been using in my lawn for a while show you how to easily build out all the parts involved show you why it's a great option for many different areas in your lawn especially if you need to sort of custom water an area that's more difficult with a traditional sprinkler let's go over all those details today and give you the info that you need on watering so there's really a couple types of sprinklers that most people are going to find when they go to the store and they're looking to get a sprinkler first one right here is one that I've used for many many years and you can kind of tell it because it's definitely looking like it's got some use but this is called an impact sprinkler these put out quite a bit of water they do some great coverage it's very customizable depending on how you want to set this thing to move so that's a really great option if you just have more of a square area that you need to do something shape wise it's not going to be too difficult and get good coverage on all that so the other option and pardon these for being filthy but this one is one that we use for the garden area because it's kind of a set area that my wife wants a real gentle rain like irrigation on it and that's exactly what this thing is good for now the only downside to these right here this is called an oscillating sprinkler is that they send the water really high up into the air and then it can be much more affected by the wind and you need sort of some calm conditions in order for this to work its best now if you have an area like our garden where you're just trying to get a gentle rain on it some of the wind affects it and all that it's not a huge deal but for a yard area then it does take quite a while to get a decent amount of water down and also that wind factor which I don't know about where you live where I live here it's pretty consistently windy a lot of the time what about though if you have sort of a custom area in your lawn maybe it's not just a straight square rectangle and it's a lot harder to get good coverage on it with one of these traditional impacts or oscillating sprinklers so I have a great example of that over here on my side yard now it's just kind of a longer strip and it doesn't have a great amount of width there so any of these sprinklers and impact or oscillating they just don't really work the best in this scenario so over the years I've showed this quite a few times on my channel but today I want to give you an updated on how to build this thing and exactly why it worked so well in an area like this or really in any area in your lawn but I made this first video on this years and years ago and it's very painful for me to watch and it's not the best so today I wanted to redo that part of the actual build show you exactly what you need for parts and go through it really quickly so that you can see how easy it is to put this thing together alright so I have the pieces right here that we're going to need is pretty simple this is going to be your sprinkler spike and all this simply does is allow water to come through with a garden hose on each side then you can stick this down into the ground to secure it yeah so whatever shape you want it to be then it will stay in that position I got some simple thread tape here this is just to minimize any leaks that are going on when you make all these connections then I've got the sprinkler base here so this would be the same thing that would be in pretty much all of your underground systems and this is going to be that same type of base we're just going to be attaching it to this spike right here so you can use it above ground and move it around but that's the exact same piece that would be in an underground system then we have this little riser right here this simply connects this piece to this piece you just need this little piece in order to connect these two together then this is the MP rotator head that I'm using there's many different ones that will fit there but I've used these over the years and I like them because this little screen on here collects your debris and you'd be surprised that you'd actually get quite a bit to still flow through there even when those screens aren't perfectly clean and it doesn't tend to need a ton of water pressure but so that will go into that base here and then we can adjust the shape and everything that will go into that so let's quickly put this together now just a couple pieces not tough at all so start with this riser piece you can see that I already have some thread tape on here because I put this together before but if you don't have any thread tape on there then just thread some of that thread tape onto here and put these two pieces together so it's basically just as simple [Music] remember that I'll have all these pieces for this thing so you can build it yourself down in the description below [Music] so those two pieces are good and secure this is going to come with this little cap on here it's simply just so you can remove this and not have it actually fall back into the sprinkler itself which is not a big deal but it's nice to have so put to your sprinkler MP rotator head into there and when we get out there I will show you this but you will notice right here maybe I don't know if you'll be able to see it or not there is a little line here so this is going to tell you where the sprinkler is going to stop as far as water goes so this is completely adjustable you're just going to click and turn it to wherever you want it to stop and then we can adjust this I didn't put any thread tape on this piece up here I've never had any issue with leaks as far as coming to the top of that piece now you can put some thread tape here on this piece if you'd like as well and on your garden hose that's kind of up to you if you'd like to but [Music] so right there that's really all that there is to it it's very simple to put together and now I'll show you how to string these together and how to use them out in the lawn it's one thing that I wish I would have done at the beginning was got some better hoses I bought pretty much just the cheapest thing I could find for twenty five-foot hoses and that's okay it'll get you by but these things kink a lot and they they're just a lot more difficult to deal with these are a little bit more expensive but I have been enjoying these sort of fabric type hoses that you can curl up they're just a lot easier to use so they are more expensive and if you don't want to invest in those obviously like I said I'm using pretty much the cheapest thing that I could find at the time but I do kind of wish I would have spent more money though on something like this that's easier to use [Music] son here once you get to the end of the line this will have a little black cap that comes with these little spikes here so they'll be one for each one and then you just wherever you want to end it just put your little cap on there and everything's good to go now you'll need to adjust these heads as I said I'm just using a little flat screwdriver here pull this piece up and then as I mentioned before you might be able to see this there's going to be a line here on this thing so wherever you want to stop going this way so now that's going to be the stopping point so water doesn't come flying any farther this way [Music] so you have the direction going perfectly that way but I don't want it spring all of this so you simply just turn this [Music] that's really all there is to it just fine-tuning your adjustments and once you're there then this system is pretty much set in place and what I do after that is whenever I wanted to mow before I would just pick those up curl up the hoses and put them right next to that where that rosebush is there and then whenever I needed to use them again I would just take those out roll out the hoses again it was sort of set in place at that point you can get different heads to customize those sizes so if you feel like that spring too far in a certain area then you can get a two thousand or a 1000 those will all be differences in how far they spray and so that's pretty much how that works the other thing you want to make sure of is that you have head-to-head coverage meaning this one spraying over here but the water is actually spraying to the actual base of this one here so you want to make sure that you have that in order for these to work best they're designed so that they will have coverage from that base to this base and then you'll have really good water coverage out into the yard so that's really why I use the 25 foot hoses as well as because I found that 25 foot in-between is perfect for using these mp3 thousands and getting the right coverage so when it comes to water pressure and how many of these you can string together I don't know the exact number I know that I have really good water pressure at my house and I can usually get three to four of these depending on the area that I want to cover to string together with no problem that will give me good coverage and I don't have an issue with that with my water pressure if you have a low water pressure you're gonna have more difficulty getting three of these strung together and for the most part three or four these strung together is going to be the best coverage for you any more than that and you're gonna lose water pressure in most scenarios and then you're not going to get even coverage so there is one other option that you could think about if you have low water pressure and this is a booster pump so I've picked up one of these at Lowe's many years ago so we actually use it to pump water out of our rain collection barrel here on the north side of our house and we use that to water the garden so you can hook these up though to your actual water faucet that's coming out of your house and then hook that to this little DIY system here and you could do it that way if you need a boost in pressure as well [Music] so for the most part lawns are going to need one to one and a half inches of water during the hottest part of the year and this one obviously includes rainfall so that's why I like to keep a rain gauge to know sort of how much rain has fallen exactly at my house and then how much irrigation I may need to add if it's looking dry or if there's a lot of dry weather in the forecast also timing for this would be best if you could do this in the very early morning hours somewhere between 5 7 a.m. I realize some of you don't get up that early so you can get timers for your faucet I've never personally really used those myself so I can't give you a for-sure recommendation on which one would be best but you can't get timers or otherwise wake up in the morning and have it set from the night before just go turn on your faucet and let it run and then usually I add a half inch of water in one setting so if you just take simple little tuna can like this or you can just use a small rain gauge and prop it out into your yard then when this thing is half full you'll have about a half an inch in there and you can take note then of how long it took your sprinklers to actually get to that half inch mark and then you'll just want to do this infrequently so don't water every day for like 10 minutes in the morning spread this out more with those heavier half-inch waterings or you can go a little more if you feel like you need it but do those in one sitting and not every single day and if you do happen to have sandy soil water is going to flush through that faster you may need to be more frequent with your waterings just depending on your soil type if you have somewhat more of a clay type like I have then it's going to hold in that moisture for a lot longer so I hope you got some information out of this to check out some more videos on my channel thanks so much for watching and we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Ryan Knorr Lawn Care

Views: 358,776

Rating: 4.9151487 out of 5

Keywords: sprinkler system, irrigation system, diy sprinkler system, diy irrigation, diy sprinkler, lawn, lawn care, lawn tips, lawn watering tips, irrigation tips, how to water your lawn, best sprinkler for your lawn, lawn sprinkler, best lawn sprinkler, Ryan Knorr, Ryan knor, Ryan knoor, Ryan Knorr lawn care, diy above ground sprinkler system, above ground sprinkler system

Id: ULXTVEyenuY

Length: 11min 18sec (678 seconds)

Published: Sun May 31 2020