How To Winterize Your Sprinklers (Sprinkler Blow Out With Air!)

hey everybody I brought my air compressor out on to my back porch and that can only mean one thing it's time to blow out my sprinklers for the year I thought I'd bring you along and show you how I do it and hopefully this can help someone along the way when it's time to blow out your sprinklers as well let's get started so let's start off by talking about the air compressor I'm going to be using this is a pretty large one you can see the specs right down here you know you won't necessarily need one this large I just happen to find this one on a fantastic deal on clearance a couple of years ago and I went ahead and picked it up and I've been using it to blow out my sprinklers ever since and before I had this larger compressor I had a really small I think four or six gallon one and that worked okay it just took longer but this is the compressor I'll be using today one more quick thing to point out about the compressor is that you'll note that I've plugged it directly into my wall outlet on my back porch here you really should not plug these into an extension cord they draw a lot of power especially when you first turn them on and there can be a risk of some electrical hazards if you try and do that or more than likely it'll just trip your breaker and not turn the compressor on so make sure that you are using an outlet that's rated with the right amperage and it's best not to use an extension cord for these one other quick thing to point out before we get started and that is my compressor will compress all the way up to a hundred and seventy five psi on the tank but I don't want to put that much pressure through my sprinkler system 75 psi or so should be plenty of pressure for this so I'm going to actually reduce the pressure coming out of the compressor put it to around 75 psi or so that'll be plenty of pressure to blow out the system so somewhere in new yard you should have an access panel that looks something like this if you open this up you'll see inside there's a bunch of different things valves and knobs and things and we'll get into that in just a minute but really close to that you should also find something that looks about like this this little cover is the access port to turn off the main water feed for my sprinkler system now both this little port and the larger box that I showed just a moment ago may be located anywhere inside your property mine happens to be in the backyard and I think that's where they're most commonly found so we'll start by removing this little cover and it just twists off the top of the pipe that it's threaded into and this pipe goes down several feet below the frost line in my area and if you look down at the very bottom of this pipe you'll see that there's a small valve there that we're gonna have to turn off and this requires a fairly special tool so this is the tool that you need you see it's got this big long handle at the top and then it's a long rod and has a special end at the bottom that's designed specifically for turning that Valve underground okay so we'll just put this down into that hole you might need a flashlight to help light up down into that hole to see exactly what you're doing but then you just turn the valve to the off position then we just replace that cover to keep water and debris from falling in there until next spring when we need to turn that valve back on okay with that valve off now we're ready to open up this other panel a little bit of work in here so there are three different things in this little box that we need to talk about the first is this valve this comes up off of the bigger valve down in the ground that we just turned off and it feeds into this ball valve so this is how we can turn off the system at the surface but it's always best to turn off both at the surface and down underground like I just showed you so the first thing I'm going to do down here is turn this valve to the off position next I'm going to open up one of the stations in my system it doesn't matter which one I'm just relieving the pressure and generally you'll need to go and turn on one of these stations in the garage or wherever your control panel is now my control panel is one that I also can actually control from my cell phone which is super convenient but totally not necessary to get this job done all you need to do at this stage is open up one of your valves for a little bit of time just enough to relieve the built-up pressure from the irrigation system okay to make sure that I've got the pressure relieved off the system I'm going to open up my filter valve it might be a little bit of water that drips out at the bottom of that that's just making sure there's no more pressure and next we're going to remove the fitting that we're going to use to connect the compressor to the system that's this set of fittings right here now when I plumbed this I used several different sizes so that I would have lots of options when it came to actually connecting my compressor not sure what you're gonna find in your box you may just find a cap there whatever it is you may have to build an adapter to plug in your air compressor I'm gonna go ahead and remove that now and then we'll talk about my adapter this is my adapter that I'm using you can see I've got an iron pipe fitting at one end it goes up a short little pipe just to get it up off the ground so I have to kneel down quite so far then I've got a little ball valve in there and then I've got that terminating and I think that's a quarter-inch air compressor typical kind of a connector you can get all of these parts at your local hardware store you may have to ask to get a little bit getting something like this built but when I went in and asked for some help with it they said oh yeah you're building the blowout system no problem and they went and grabbed all the Parts I needed and I think all in this cost me around $20 all right with that cap removed we can go ahead and screw in my adapter may notice I'm not really bothering with teflon tape on this it's just gonna be in here long enough to blow out the system but I'm gonna go ahead and make sure it's in there nice and snug okay now it's time to attach the compressor before I actually attach the air there's a couple of things to just double-check make sure that this valve here is closed I'm going to attach the air but I don't want any of the air getting past this valve and down into the system quite yet secondly make sure that this is actually closed just double-check that and then also make sure you close the valve on the bottom of your filter housing so that there is no way for the air to get out except through the sprinkler heads themselves okay with everything set up like this we're ready to connect our air so we'll just plug in our air hose like this and then we're gonna open this valve okay with our air all hooked up we're ready to start blowing out each of the stations it doesn't matter which station you start with I happen to like to start at the back of my property and move forward but you can start with whatever station you want here we go I'm going to turn on the station that runs along this back little curvy part and we'll watch to see when the water stops coming out and air is coming out of all of the heads instead you can see they're all blowing water still but before too long all that water will have been pushed out of the system and they'll start blowing air all right so I've shown you the entire setup and getting started with blowing out these stations now from here on out it's just cycle through each of the stations until all of the water is completely out but I thought I'd take this opportunity to address a couple of questions I think are gonna probably come up the first question is why are you even doing this well the short answer to that is because I don't want my pipes to burst you see I live in an area where it gets quite cold in the wintertime and it's going to get below freezing and stay there for a while my sprinkler pipes are not buried very deep and so if they're still full of water since they are above what's called the frost line then they are going to freeze solid and water expands when it freezes and it can burst pipes so you blow out a sprinkler system like this so that when it gets below freezing outside there's no water inside the pipes to freeze expand and burst your pipes now obviously if you live in an area where it doesn't ever get below freezing you don't need to worry about doing this some people wonder just how much air they need to blow through each station now every single system is going to be unique and each station will have a different number of heads really what you need to do is just watch each of the heads to make sure that they're no longer blowing a solid stream of water once they're blowing a mist or a fog then you've gotten all the water out of that station but do make sure that every head on the station is blowing that way you don't want to just go until the first couple of heads on the station are blowing out the mist make sure all of them are so another question is just how early in the season do I need to do this and in my opinion you need to do it before you start getting hard freezes at night dipping into the upper 30s Fahrenheit or even down below the freezing mark for just a couple of hours overnight is not likely to hurt anything but once it gets down below freezing and stays there all night your system really needs to have been blown out or you're risking bursting some pipes now you may be wondering now that you've seen the process for getting started is this really worth it I mean it's not that expensive to just hire someone well and it's true that whoever you hire is likely to have a much stronger compressor that will blow out your system much more quickly but of course what you're doing there is just trading your time for your money so it's entirely up to you this takes me about two hours to do start to finish including all the cleanup at the end and I like doing it because it lets me be able to check my entire system make sure all the heads are working properly clean out the filters and I know that the system's been blown out right and that's why I like to do it myself and finally a couple of warnings for you so every system is different and yours may not look anything like mine mine is set up on an irrigation water supply that's actually separate from my city water supply for my home so if yours is using the same water supply as your home then your water shut-off valve will likely be somewhere inside your house and a crawlspace in a basement and you'll likely have a backflow preventer plumbed somewhere in the system that you'll need to be careful you don't blow any air through so if you're not sure about how your system is plumbed and where the water comes from and where other shutoff valves are and if you've got a backflow preventer and all those kinds of things well maybe it would be best for this year to go ahead and hire a service to come and blow out your sprinklers for you and as they're doing it you can follow them around and ask questions and take notes about the specifics of your system so that you're ready for next year and you can then do it yourself alright so that covers all the questions I've thought of but maybe you've got a different question if you do go ahead and leave it down in the comments and I'll do my best to get you the right answer so let's skip ahead to after you're finished blowing out all of your stations okay now that I finished it's time to turn this valve to the off position so we're no longer attempting to pressurize this and remove the air hose from the compressor now this is still under pressure so now we need to open this back up to relieve the pressure completely from the system this is going to be a little loud finally open it a little ways to let the air bleed out a little bit slower okay now the system is completely depressurized I can go ahead and remove this and replace it with my plug that I put fresh test ball and tape on [Music] one last thing I like to do while I'm in here now that I'm done blowing out the system and that is I like to take out my filter and get it cleaned so that it's ready to go for next spring just pull off the bottom case pull the filter out I'm just gonna give it a quick rinse maybe scrub it out with a toothbrush and then it's ready for next spring [Music] now with the filter reinstalled this valve closed and this plug put back in the system is just about ready to put to bed for the winter there's one last thing I like to do and that is open this valve about a quarter turn or so now the reason for that is that when you close this valve the way the mechanism inside there works it actually traps a little bit of water on either side of that ball and that small amount of water is is actually enough that when it freezes it could damage this ball valve so by opening it up a quarter turn it allows all that water that was stuck in the mechanism to actually drain out and we shouldn't have any problem with that freezing it's a little tip I picked up from one of the associates at Home Depot in the plumbing section he recommended I do it makes sense to me certainly can't hurt anything reinstall my cover here and my sprinklers are ready for winter well so that's not going to do it for this one as you can see it's not a terribly difficult job does require a couple specialty tools though particularly whatever you need to hook up to your system you may have to get a little creative in the plumbing department to get exactly the right kind of an adapter to go from your air compressor into your sprinklers once you've got that figured out it's just a matter of walking through each station and taking the time to blow them all the way out hey if this video helped you out at all I'd sure appreciate a quick little thumbs up and if you want to see more videos like this in the future you can always think about subscribing but of course there's no pressure there but as always thank you very much for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: AmplifyDIY

Views: 311,945

Keywords: sprinkler blow out with air, winterize your sprinklers, sprinkler blow out, sprinkler winterization, sprinkler blowout, sprinkler blowout diy, How to winterize your sprinklers, winterize irrigation, winterize sprinklers, winterizing sprinklers, winterize sprinkler system, how to blow out sprinklers, blow out sprinkler system, irrigation blow out, sprinkler system blow out, irrigation winterize, how to winterize inground sprinklers, blow out, winterize, sprinkler system

Id: WHMqAlOD_K8

Length: 13min 33sec (813 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 05 2019