Although it's too late for a lot of you that have already bought compressors ...
You would have been better off buying just a small, portable air tank (5 or 10 gallons) and rig it up with the appropriate gate-valve and connectors to attach to your sprinkler plumbing.
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fill the tank, either take it to a service station or buy a small electric compressor.
I rigged up a 5 gallon tank so that I have a medium-sized electric compressor connected to the tank as well as having the tank connected to the sprinker system at the same time. This minimizes the time it takes to disconnect / reconnect the tank to recharge it.
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you need to purge a sprinker line is a massive blast of high-pressure air - which some of you now realize comes mainly from having a large tank that's been pre-charged. And only turn on 1 zone at a time when you do it.
And you need a low-restriction gate or ball valve to let the air out of the tank and into the line with as little restriction as possible.
If you connect a low-capacity / low-volume air compressor to your system and find that you can't exceed a pressure of 30 psi then your sprinkler system is probably self-draining and the air is bleeding out the drain. You need more than 50 psi to force the heads up.