Repairing Sprinkler Valves without replacing the valve.

greetings everyone my name is Jimmy Wendell I'm the owner of 4l irrigation we get a lot of calls about valves and so today I want to do a video about vowels and one of the things I try to get people an idea of the cost when they call and one of the things I tell them once I hear the symptoms that they're talking about and decide that it could be a vowel and those symptoms are things like a single zone is barely letting out water when I turn it on or the single zone is not letting out any water at all or a single zone is running all the time or a single zone is leaking all the time those are all good indications that we may have an issue with the valve now there are other issues that could be in there like electrical and different things of that nature but again once we do some troubleshooting we look at those symptoms and we say that sounds like a vowel then what I try to tell people is there's a big difference if we have to repair a valve or if we have to replace it I just did this one of the day before yesterday and I went to a client's house and I told her exactly that over the phone we had a leak in the scenario this scenario and so I told her if we can repair it it'll be really quick if it's coming from the valve itself somewhere but if it's coming from the piping I'll have to cut it out this scenario is why it can be so expensive if you look here you see what they have is they have these fittings that are literally next to each other with no piping in between so there was no way that I can cut this anywhere but the main line and once I do that I have to take out all three valves you can also see that these are threaded fittings but if you can't turn the valve for whatever reason either there's something solid underneath that you can't turn it or in this scenario they're right back to back and there would be absolutely no way to turn it then again you have to replace everything the more things you have like here where you have a coupling tee or reducer all of these things add to the time that's involved so if we repair a valve and if we can't do that you're talking probably 45 minutes but if we have to replace everything in this scenario we're talking about three we had to find it dig it up replace it put it all back together we have a three hour scenario there so that's the big difference the other thing that we have to deal with these are old vials and I can't find parts for these anymore so even if we did have a leak inside of this if it's not a contemporary valve we still have to replace the whole thing here in North Texas there's a you know four or five main vials that we see this is a Toro valve a near trough valve a hunter valve a Rainbird valve and a weatherman these are the most common ones and these are the ones that I carry on my truck so if it's one of these valves and we have a problem with the valve itself I can actually take this apart and I'm going to show you how to do it in just a second and I can leave this in so I don't have to cut anything out I just take the top of it off and I can replace the guts of it with the diaphragm a spring a new type of new solenoid and that basically fixes all the problems of the valve and we don't have to spend all the time and money of cutting it out a couple of things to keep in mind if you do this yourself what is some of these we'll go on anyway like for instance I can put this diaphragm on and no matter how I put it on it's going to be okay all the rest of these though they have to be put on a certain way the air chaw has a little tip on it that has to go right here to where this solenoid sits and that has to go that way this is another one the hunter it has a little tip on it and again it has to go right where that Silla Nord is gonna sit and it has to be put right in that spot same way with the rainberge it has a specific way that this diaphragm has to go on even on the weather Matic there's a little click there that has to be on that way so the problem is you have to find exactly the same vowel for instance Iruvar bought out a called Hardy and I had another name with it as well some of those and they look like the exact same valve some of them you can replace and some of them you can't but if any of these parts are different then you have to cut it out and replace the whole thing so a real quick scenario here I'm going to take this one apart the first thing I will say is it's probably going to be in a bow box like this right and so I would dig it up don't try to do it from the top of this valve box because even if you get the top off and you can manipulate it it's probably going to fill up with water so I would suggest highly that you dig it all out it's kind of like painting if you do the work upfront of taping off cleaning all that it makes the painting a whole lot easier in this scenario you don't want all the dirt in the junk to go back into the valve so the first thing dig it up get it all clear but you have plenty of room to work remember this will be have pipes on each side and it will not be able to move this is what they call a jar top bottle and it's the same as this air trevally what we're going to do is just show you how simple it is to take this off take all of this out assuming that if it's the spring that's bad if it's a the diaphragm which it usually is or if it's the cylinder with any of those scenarios we can take those out and then we just put everything new from this one back into it it's a ring back in place there's no specific way that that has to go in this scenario the spring is in between this up here so I don't even have to do that and I just simply put it back together and you screw it down hand tight and now we have just repaired that valve and so if any of those symptoms that we talked about should be fix a couple of things to keep in mind one have a piece of wire and wherever that this diaphragm is and it's allowing the water to come in from that cylinder just put that wiring and make sure that there's no debris in there because sometimes that can do it each one of these has a place that you can do it right and this one had actually been in the top of this just make sure that nothing is getting it clogged up that's one tool you have the other scenario that you want to have if it's screws I always use an impact wrench you can use a screwdriver but once you strip those out then you're forcing either to go get a little out kit like this which takes out stretch screws so that's what I've done just in case that happens or agin you have to cut it out so have the right tools I have an extension I have a nut driver for the different sizes and that makes it so much easier so again this is a pretty simple process as you saw but there's a lot of variants in the type of house this is something that a homeowner can do very easily and you can save yourself a lot of time and money just do it the right way get it dug out make sure that there's not going to be dirt and things going back into it these Silla nodes there will be two wires that you'll have to disconnect from the other one and these are non polarized so it doesn't matter which wire it goes to but make sure you use waterproof wire nuts on this so it doesn't corrode on you and go bad on you in time and that's really a pretty simple scenario

Channel: 4L Irrigation Repair

Views: 299,066

Keywords: how to repair sprinkler valves, how to repair a sprinkler valve in the ground, howto repair a sprinkler valve without cutting it out, how to repair a rainbird sprinkler valve, how to repair an irritrol sprinkler valve, how to repair a toro sprinkler valve, how to repair a weathermatic sprinkler valve, when to repair a sprinlker valve vs replace it, sprinkler repairs, how to repair sprinkler valve in ground, how to repair sprinkler valve without changing valve

Id: Y-SzmZZ2VUk

Length: 7min 31sec (451 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 28 2019