How To Winterize Your Sprinklers

hi I'm Dave with the brew Phil parks department I'm going to show you how to winterize your sprinkler system let's go check it out so I'm going to talk about the process of winterizing the sprinkler system starting with the backflow preventor the reason why this is the most important thing to think about is because as you can see it is exposed to the elements outside here above-ground and all made of metal therefore it's very opting as soon as the temperatures drop below the freezing point so with that said after locating the backflow preventer on the outside of the house the next thing to do is to shut down the water supply to it so here we are in the basement of the house and we've located the wall opposite the backflow preventer and found where the copper line comes through the wall so if we trace that line along the ceiling here we'll find that it comes down here where it tees off the main line coming into the house you see you've got your main shutoff here that shuts down the entire house so we don't want to mess with that one we can see on our line going to the sprinklers we've got a shutoff right here which is a ball valve that requires a quarter turn so that the handle is at a right angle or 90 degree angle to the pipe so that means it's shut off now you can also see just above it there is a drain screw right here so if I take my pliers and break open that drain you see water starts coming out right away I'll go ahead and pull that drain cap completely off of there now I didn't get a lot of water but I'm liable to get quite a bit more once I go outside and break that siphon of water inside the pipe so I'm going to be sure that I put a bowl down under here and I'll just drop the cap in the bowl for now so I don't lose it that's going to catch any water that comes back through after we go back outside to the backflow preventor okay now that we've got the water shut down inside the house the first thing we're going to do when we're back at the backflow preventer is locate the test protruding from the side of the device so with a flathead screwdriver we can locate the little screws on side of these test and by turning those those are actually little ball valves just like the shutdown valve we saw inside or these ball valves here so by turning that a quarter turn until the screw is in line with these little valves you'll see water comes out so by opening these up not only by drained water through the backflow preventor right here but I've broken that siphon on this leg the upstream leg of the backflow preventor allowing that water to drain down through that drain that we open on the inside which was why we left that bowl under it to catch that water that would come back through now I also see on this one there's another little drain here at the bottom which is good because there's potential for water to get trapped in there so I'll take my pliers once again and open this drain just like we did with the one downstairs and you can see we're getting quite a bit more water drained out so now I'm going to let that continue to drain while we go through the rest of the process to make sure that that's nice and clear in here and we don't have water trapped in there so I'm going to take that drain cap that I just pulled it put it in a safe place like in my pocket so I don't lose that okay so now that we've drained down this side of the backflow we know we've still got water in this side so we're going to have to go locate a valve box usually it's a valve box that's got the zone valves in it and we'll find a drain in there so that we can get this side drain down as well okay so now we've identified a valve box in the yard so I'm going to use a flathead screwdriver just kind of pry that lid off of there open it up and I can see I do have the zone valves in here with a drain on the side of it so in this particular valve I can use a small pair of needle nose pliers to get on each side of it to get it cracked open until I can freely turn this with my hand and you'll see water coming out the water is now draining and will let that stay open and drain so now that we know that we've drained down the backflow preventor I took that cap that I had stuck in my pocket so I didn't lose it and I'm going to put that back on that drain and one thing that people often overlook is the fact that all of these ball valves including the small ball valves on these test need to be half open or in other words turn to a 45 degree position they need to be left that way for the winter so the reason for 45 in all of these ball valves is that if they are fully open or fully closed water can actually get trapped in there and leave cracks or breaks in these valves so for the entire winter you want to make sure that all of these valves are in a 45 degree position including these little screws on the test box so now that we know that we've got the backflow preventer drained down and we know that this is not going to freeze the next thing to think about is the possibility that especially on some larger systems you may want to blow out the sprinkler lines using compressed air now a word of advice on that is if you attempt to do it yourself there are dangers that come with that make sure you know what you're doing if you connect air to your backflow preventor you want to go downstream of the backflow preventor don't use the test do not blow through the backflow preventer you can cause damage that way and if you do attach air to your system make sure that you're operating at low psi on your air compressors 60 pounds or less is recommended now if you don't feel comfortable with doing this on your own we highly recommend that you hire a professional irrigation contractor to go ahead and blow your system out for you so there you have it for more information go to Broomfield org thank you you

Channel: The Broomfield Channel

Views: 810,416

Keywords: broomfield, colorado, water, water conservation, sprinklers, sprinkler, sprinkler system, winterize, winterize sprinkler, winterize sprinklers, winterize sprinkler system

Id: FS4sIG9DzBI

Length: 6min 51sec (411 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 14 2016