You get a replacement line big enough for that section and a couple of connectors, and then splice out the bad part and and replace wtih the new ones. It’s an easy fix
Here are a couple of links to back up @Modawg2k’s description. The Ewing guys will show you too.
http://www.sprinklerwarehouse.com/DIY-Sealing-a-rip-in-drip-tubing-s/6550.htm
http://turning-pro.com/2010/12/28/452/
If your irrigation is greater than 5 years old, you might find that you’ll start playing whack-a-mole with these leaks. I’ve already had to completely replace my system in our front yard, and will have to do so again soon. I just went through a repair like this last weekend in my front yard. I ended up pulling a 6 foot section that had two leaks. When I pulled I found it had already been repaired with couplers 5 times! We just renovated our back yard last year and we put in a PVC based drip system there so we wouldn’t have to deal with this issue.
Good luck.
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My setup is about 6 years old and I had to repair the same general area about 4 times now in the past year.
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The absolute best part of the Rachio system is that I can use the app on my phone to turn on a zone and start inspecting. Upon finding a broken emitter or one that needs to be plugged I can use the app to shut off the water, fix it, and turn it back on without running around to the other side of the house. That alone is worth it’s weight in gold!
I’m pretty sure that all the leaks are now fixed and the emitters are working correctly. I now need to figure out an irrigation plan. I checked out the Water It Wisely website but can’t believe that I should go so many days between watering cycles.
Can you guys share your watering cycle/setup? Thanks!
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What’s your soil AW from the link provided
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Okay, I finally was able to go through that link in order to confirm/find the soil type. Here are the items that I think we’re looking for:
Momoli gravelly sandy loam, 1 to 5 percent slopes. Rating 0.08
Typical profile
A - 0 to 3 inches: gravelly sandy loam
Bw - 3 to 60 inches: very gravelly sandy loam
Please let me know your thoughts and next steps. Thanks!
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So for Soil, you can set it to something like “Sandy Loam”, but then go into advanced settings and change your ‘Available Water’ (AW) to 0.08. The lower this number, the more sandy the soil is. Sandier soil allows water to flow thru it faster, but it also does not hold onto water as long as clay-type soils.
Next step, set your vegetation correctly, so if you have the one zone with all trees, set that one to trees. Your Zone 3 looks like all shrubs, so set that to shrubs. I would probably treat your zone 6 small tree as a shrub and water accordingly.
Next step is exposure… pretty self explanatory.
Any questions on those steps?
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Those settings make sense. I updated the zone setting accordingly. Some questions:
- In the advanced, there are settings for Area, Root Depth, Allowed Depletion (ie 50%), Efficiency (90%) and Crop Coefficient (75%). Do I just leave these alone?
- Regarding the Area from question above, how do I calculate? I’m assuming it’s generalizing the qty of emitters based on the area, is that right? I don’t have lawn, so everything is shrubs/vines/trees. How would I change that to reflect the amount of emitters?----- For instance: Zone 2, I have about 6 trees with 3 x 2gph emitters on each–how would I set that up?
Thanks!
Area: This has no impact on your watering and is used only by Rachio to give you an estimated amount of water used. To be honest, I wouldn’t even mess with this out of the box. Once you feel comfortable that your Rachio is watering your yard correctly, then you can play around with this setting.
Root Depth: This will default to the type of plant you have set for the zone. So if it’s a tree only zone, it’ll be one lenth, if it’s a shrub zone, it’ll be 15" i think. I would leave it for now on the default for whatever plant type you set… example: your shrub zone will default to 15", and Rachio will water to a depth of 15" every time.
Allowed Depletion: default is 50… basically it says that your Rachio will water when it thinks your soil is about 50% depleted of moisture…I believe Rachio uses this number because it’s been shown to have the best effect for plants… i keep mine at 50.
Effeciency: how effecient is your zone at putting the amount of water out that it says it is… not as big of a deal with drips (used more for sprinklers), I’d just keep it at 100 since your drops are appropriately placed at the plant.
Coeffeicient: How fast does your plant use up water resources, it’ll deafult based off the plant setting… again, i’d leave it alone assuming you have the correct plant setting, you can tweak it once you get a feel for the system. You’ll noticed shrubs have 0.5 vs treets of 0.75.
Some people say put a 1 for each emitter.
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@jeremysm1 For weather, you’ll want to make sure you are connecting to a station that is using correct information. What station are you connecting to?
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Thanks for the info on those settings–I made the adjustments. As for the weather station, I’m 3.6 miles from the nearest one in Scottsdale (KSDL) which sounds good to me.
As it stands, none of my watering is scheduled–it’s all manual. What’s the best practice for setting up schedules? I found a local Phoenix area nursery’s website with some generalizations on watering, see here: http://www.elginnursery.com/hints.php
What’s baffling my mind is that my schedule was for 50min-60min 5-6 days per week whereas all the recommendations that I found online seem to say something like once per week or even once per every two weeks. I have typical desert landscaping for the most part.
Perfect, airports are great. I’m about 4 miles from Deer Valley, but I’ve started using a neighbor’s personal weather station once I was familiar w/ the Rachio and better understood everything.
You are definitely overwatering. Plants benefit from longer run times, and infrequent waterings. This promotes strong root growth while conserving water. When you overwater, your roots stay shallow towards the surface, and are more suseptible to drought, etc. My shrubs are currently watering for about an hour every 8 days with our temps hanging out around the 90’s.
Since you are watering so much, I would honestly just switch over to the flex daily schedule and let it do it’s thing. You aren’t doing this middle of teh summer so it’s not like your plants are going to suffer too much, but there may be a bit of a shock from them when you take their training wheels off from the overwatering.
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What does the flex daily schedule do / how does it work? And, more importantly, how do I turn it on? I’m still discovering areas of the app. Thx
first have your zones setup, are you done with that?
Yes, all the zones are setup.
Nice, one last thing I forgot before setting up your schedules… what are you using for your nozzles right now? Just the default “Emitter”?
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Most of the emitters are .5gph I believe, some are 1gph but honestly most of my foliage is ground cover stuff. The zone with just the trees use a 2gph red emitter and I created it and used it as such.
Ok, the last thing you need to think about in your settings is the nozzle type. If you selected the “Emitter” from the default list, you’ll see that it’ll water 0.5 inches per hour. Unfortunately there is no clear number to select based off your emitters’ GPH. And obviously your 0.5 GPH will put out far less than your 2 GPH… but you are also watering to a greater depth with your 2GPH for your trees… again, no clear answers @azdavidr setup another great reference to play around with your custom nozzle settings once you are familiar with things
I think your best bet is to leave the Emitter setting at the default 0.5 and you can play around w/ that later.
Do you want to test out the Flex daily with just 1 zone vs putting them all on the schedule right away? Some people like doing a test sample
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Can you describe the Flex Daily setting? Does it take into account my weather, season, and water requirements based on the settings we setup for each zone? Do you know when it’s scheduled to water and for how much or do you just read the logs? Thanks!
If you haven’t checked out the support docs, give them a once over. I think Rachio did a good job of making them user friendly.
http://support.rachio.com/article/382-flex-schedule-faq
That is what Flex daily is best at. It’ll account for weather conditions and adjust. So if the airport/weather station you are using gets 0.25" of rain, it’ll add 0.25" of water to your moisture balance without physically watering the yard. If it’s 10 degrees cooler one day, it’ll account for that by decreasing the amount of moisture that was used up by the plant. There is a cool feature called the moisture graph that’ll paint a nice picture of what’s happened/going to happen in your zone once you setup the Flex daily schedule.
You can see when your system will water next in several areas. The calendar will show you, the moisture graph (if you are using flex daily), and in the My Yard section, each zone will say when it’ll water next.
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