Finding and Fixing a missing sprinkler head that's grown over with grass

hi it's gary with mulch right today i thought maybe come along with me i've got i'm in a customer's house i'm going to fix some irrigation problems he's been having i thought i'd just show you how i go about diagnosing this and maybe how we fix each one of these little repairs it's just some simple head adjustments and things like that but it might be helpful for you so let's take a look first thing i'm going to do is pop on the zone one of the zones he's having trouble with so i was here when i started up this system a week or two ago and i noticed there were some heads that weren't popping up i went ahead and fixed a couple of those the reason they weren't popping up is because they were buried too far under the ground so now along the driveway here most of them are popping up but as we notice as we get down here to the end there should be at least one more sprinkler between here in the street i'm guessing it's going to be in this area somewhere so what i'm going to do is i'm going to measure the distance between the other sprinklers in this area and from that point i'm going to make a guesstimate and measure on down the line to try to find out the suspected area of that first thing i'm going to do is take a little bit of marking paint so now i've just marked three of them so that should be giving me a good idea how far apart these are spaced so uh let's take a look at that and i'm gonna shut the system off so we can get some measurements and start to dig all right so um i've measured the distance between the working sprinkler heads i've come up with approximately 13 to 13 and a half foot between them so i just marked those and then to find the missing one of course i just measured 13 so 13 and a half foot is right here might not be able to see that too well because it's green marking paint um but uh i'm just going to dig around this area and see what we find now i'm just going to peel the sod off of that spot and if we're close we'll see a sprinkler head there we go there's a sprinkler head uh it's buried about two and a half inches under uh the surface and that's probably not why it's coming up so next thing we're going to do is simply just turn the system back on and we're going to see if it comes up all right so that's good news you can see it's come up problem is the sprinkler head needs to be raised so that uh it can actually get through the sod and be to the right height with the surface so let's go ahead and take care of that next all right so what we do next is figure out how high we have to raise this sprinkler to make it the right level so i just take a straight uh i just took the shovel and i put it across the hole and of course i'm going to measure we're going to find out that it needs to be raised up about two and a half inches so there's a couple different ways that you can do that first off let's take a look at what we would expect to see under the ground now at the bottom of the sprinkler the sprinkler head is going to be similar to this one and it's going to be assembled under the ground like this there's going to be the supply line which is a one inch line like that and there'll be a fitting in there connecting this pipe that pipe is called the swingline it swings out to the sprinkler heads on the end of sprinkler head there's going to be a fitting like this with the thread where your sprinkler head screws in so one way that you can repair that would be to get a small piece of line and you could cut the sprinkler line right here uh you need to bend this line upwards so you end up bending the line like this put the barb fitting in you have to bend the line upwards then you can use a straight fitting like this on the end because you end up with a barb fitting like that bent up with the straight fitting on the end and then you can put your sprinkler head right back on there so you'd end up with a line like this the line another barb fitting up into the end so that's definitely one way you can fix those barb fittings are kind of tough to get in there's some tricks to that you don't need any clamps you just press them in or you can use a micro torch to heat up the line that way it slides in easier however there's another way to fix it it's much easier to do so what we're going to do is we're we're gonna use one of these sometimes you might not be able to find these at like a lowe's or a home depot so you have to go to irrigation supply or landscape supply center to find this and this is just a riser extension tube so what we'll do with it will look a lot more like this this is the existing setup and then what we'll look for is to add a riser like this so all we're going to have to do is unscrew this then we'll take our riser tube and screw it onto there and then we'll take this and screw it back on to the appropriate height and that'll give us our height to extend the sprinkler head to the right spot um one thing to note about these little tools as you can see it's threaded in four different sections well depending on your height here you can just cut it off between these threads to change your height so in this situation um we only need about two and a half inches so i measure this from top to bottom this will screw in that far and this will screw in this will screw into the base that far and then the head's going to screw in this far so that leaves us this section right here they're actually raising and we're going to be left with uh just over two inches so in this situation uh one of these riser tubes just by itself is going to be perfect so let's get to that now we'll show you how easy it is to raise this up okay so first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to take off the nozzle i'll use a little tool like this you can also use a screwdriver to pry under there but these tools are easier you just squeeze it lift it up then i can clamp it like that on the sprinkler head and then i'm going to take off the top nozzle and the filter this will be reused now see all the gunk that's in the filter we'll clean that out before we put it back together now i can let this back down and now i simply am just going to twist this out now sometimes you'll twist it and just the top will come off so what you want to try to do is twist the whole wobble it around like this to give yourself some play then you want to just unscrew the whole sprinkler head [Music] just like that now you'll see it's filled with water so we can't see down in there because of the water but we know it's down in there so we're gonna tighten this on just like that i want to set this back down in the center trying not to touch the outside edges i'm going to screw it back on there now we're going to check the height once again to see if we're okay and that looks like it's just going to be um about ground level or slightly underground level uh so i think we're good with that height so at this point i'm going to go turn the sprinkler system back on the reason i'm going to do that is i'm going to force any dirt and debris dirty water that's got down in the line back up out of that line before i put the spray nozzle back on now you can see it's just plain straight water back out of here so we can turn it back off and put our nozzle back on while we had it on we can clean the filter make sure we get all the debris out of there and we might as well clean out the spray nozzle as well now let's go shut it back off now i'm cutting a little hole out of the sod to make some room for it then i can take my tool now if you don't have this tool you can unscrew the top head and just slide that nozzle up and press it back in with the spring otherwise you just take my little tool bring it up i'll clamp that on i'm going to take the filter put back in now one thing you want to note is that this spray head it shows you on these spray heads what direction they spray this spray head actually spray only two directions this way and that way so we're going to put the spray nozzle back on and try to orient it in the correct direction and you can tell sort of by the indentations on the top of the sprinkler head which way it's going to spray now if it's not on there that's perfect it's not a big deal because once you get the spray head in you can just rotate the top of it like this turn it however you need to we're done with that we're gonna let it go back down in we're gonna put the sod back in place we're gonna make room for the sprinkler head and we're just gonna pack all this back in place with our feet so now we're just going to check to see if our repair worked make one little minor adjustment hopefully you can do that yourself it's pretty easy let's go on to repair number two sorry about the water uh if so then i just saved you 65 dollars parts on that are pretty cheap um i think uh parts on that were about two dollars hopefully that's helped you and if you're trying to raise some sprinkler heads up for one reason or another you can either use a riser and actually do that yourself it's really not that tough of a repair just takes uh getting a little bit of messy some digging and some know-how so subscribe to my channel keep watching i'm going to show you all kinds of tips about other sort of landscape stuff thanks for watching

Channel: Columbus Landscapers

Views: 95,149

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Id: Ih6uFMfRtU4

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 30 2021