Yard Work, Sigh...

I was a checking up on some fried looking plants in the backyard. Hard to tell if they’re not getting enough water or its just that its been stupid hot (110℉+) the last week or so.

Lets start with flags, those are the little faucet looking things at the end of the drip lines. With the incredibly hard water we have, they’re constantly crusting over from minerals. Nope, that’s not it. I recently learned you can just pull the valve out and knock off the sediment or little dirt bits that get stuck and these were all clean.

Walking back to the next plant and oh no, the tell tale sign of a leak, a bunch of fine sand piled on top of landscape rocks. Earlier this year, I did a massive drip line replacement project. I replaced a 30 foot section of line that had 9 different junctions in it from previous leaks. I call that my first Rage Repair.

The new area that’s leaking is just beyond where that repair finished. This is pretty typical. The new line puts stress on the old line when you connect it and the lack of flex in the new line raises the pressure in the remaining line causing old lines to split. Good times.

Dug up the effected area. Not obvious where the leak is. I’m too lazy to turn that sprinkler zone on to find it visually because then I have spend half an hour bailing out the trench to actually make the repair. Took my best guess and cut out the suspected bad pipe and put a replacement in with some couplers.

The moment of truth, turn on the zone. Immediate unpleasant hissing sound and cloud of spray quickly alerted me that I didn’t find the leak. Turns out it was just a few inches past where I made the repair. Sigh. Take 2, cut out the bad part and splice in a new part. Second test confirmed that the leak was now actually repaired.

The leak was pretty bad and flooded out a corner of the yard pretty good. While walking back the sprinkler controller, I noticed it was wet pretty far away. Geez, I guess that leak was worse than I thought. Uh, nope, there’s another leak.

This one was pretty bad too. I wasn’t sure if it was one leak or many without a whole lot of digging. Eventually found the leak in a place I repaired recently. Ugh, that pipe should not be failing like that. Cue Rage Repair v2.

I dug up all the way back to the start of the first Rage Repair. This was extra fun because the line takes a dive under a decorative brick curb. I connected to the far side worked my way back to the irrigation source. This time I added a PVC sleeve where it goes under the curb; if you don’t do that the thump at beginning or ending of water cycle will eventually rub a hole in the line where it touches the concrete in the curb.

Anyway, got it all connected up again and things look water tight, for the most part. There’s a teeny tiny drip from the line before the last repair. I’m not even sure its actually a leak; it might just be water draining back into the trench because the prior big leak pushed some of the water backwards along the trail of the line. I’m sure it’ll probably let go sometime. That’ll be another exciting repair because that line goes under a sidewalk.

So, I thought I was gonna get away with a 30 minute one and done repair. Negative, captain. Ended up eating up 2.5 hours of time and a good selection of irrigation parts from my local stash. As I sit back typing this up my back and thighs are screaming at me from all the manual labor. Oh, yeah, hurts so good.

Tomorrow, the plan is to try to get caught up on some delayed grass cutting. I’ve been using the excuse that the new summer grass I planted was still coming in, but now its definitely ready for a trim.