I have a very long line of rhododendron bushes which are hardy but are starting to wilt.
I noticed the animals chewed right through the thin plastic in just a couple of spots.
I can't for the life of me, find where the water comes from that feeds this irrigation line (it has always been dry since I bought the place from the bank, owner unknown to me).
To get a background on this thin piping, what is an accepted repair procedure?
And, normally, how does it get it's water? I find no sprinkler electrical box that feeds this line???
Normally it's connected to a water source. This black poly irrigation line is so cheap that there is no point in trying to repair it. After you figure out where it's connected to water replace it. Google poly tubing and follow the links that look like they belong to irrigation or sprinkler sites. I think I got 500' of 5/8" for about $50 not long ago.
If it's always been dry while you've been there, and there are holes in it, it's probably an abandoned line. The controller may have been removed and the feed line reconfigured.
Repairing such things is problematic. The pipe is cheap enough that running a new line would probably take less overall time and cost less money than buying fittings and such. Might be an exaggeration, but not a big one.
You won't know if you repaired all of the holes without locating, patching, testing, locating...repeat a number of times. Digging a
100' trench one foot down in typical soil might take a couple or three hours depending on who's doing the digging.
R
Snip off a 6" piece of it. Take it to a supplier, and buy an adapter to go from a garden hose to it, or better yet, get a T so you can go into the line at any point. Connect hose, adapter, and black line. Turn on hose. See where water comes out, and repair accordingly. If it is water water everywhere, you might reconsider and replace all. Maybe there is enough still there to salvage with new plugs, feeder lines, and bubblers. It is simple to double the ends over and put on the figure eight terminators if the whole pipe is open on the end, and it is simple to buy some more tubing, and splice and repair. Digging up several hundred yards of this sounds like a big job. You might get lucky, and find that it was done in sections. Don't forget to install a pressure reducer if you put on an automatic timer, as water hammer will blow those little 1/4" fittings right out.
It goes down the driveway. The house is on a hill. The driveway winds up the hill. It's about 300 long strides, so, I figure it's three hundred yards long. All along, on both sides, are oleander bushes. They survive, even in our long summers without rain. But they're wilting brown.
I'll look for that at OSH later this week. Thanks!
What you mean is that there must be a water supply. I agree with you. What I'll do is dig up one line at the top of the hill and see if I can follow it to the water feed!
There seems to be two lines of tubing down each side. It's only slightly buried most of the way as it pops up for a foot or two in a variety of spots. So I'd say it's only 'covered' and not 'buried'.
Northern California.
In spots, it's exposed to the sun. I didn't realize it was cheap. If it's only $50, then I think I'll replace the whole thing.
However, digging a trench in the hard-caked mudpack will be a lot of work. I might be lucky in that pulling up the old trench (after soaking with water to loosen the mudpack) might leave just enough 'trench' to cover the plastic tubing from the unrelenting sun.
That's what I will do! It seems like the only logical approach because I can't find the water source by just looking!
It allows both for temporary watering of the oleander bushes and for debugging as to where the leaks lie.
The water pressure I have is tremendous. I don't know the pressure but it shoots out from a hose about, oh, twenty feet or so (way more than most garden hoses!).
So, I will ask OSH about the pressure reducers too!
I'd also focus on figuring out what it might be or might have been connected to for water supply. Usually irrigation systems like that are fed from the house, but could be fed from somewhere else.
If the pipe is shot in many places, it may be easier to have a new piece pulled by an irrigation company. Depending on the soil, they usually don't trench it, they just pull it with a tractor that makes a slit in the ground. I've pulled 500 ft of it in 15 mins. And the pipe is inexpensive.
Also, apparently you don't know if this has heads, is drip, etc? That's another factor. Sounds like it may be an amateur job because for that length of run pro would typically be pulling 1" pipe.
Thats interesting. Here, it's along both sides of a driveway so they could drive up and down the driveway, with a slitter to the sides.
The only problem might be the bushes themselves are grown out to the driveway, even though they're planted about 18 to 25 inches (or so) back from the driveway. They could have been planted in the 80's when the house was built! (I don't know.)
It has little quarter inch (or a bit smaller) tubes running out at intervals, from what I can see popping above the leaf debris & rocks that used to cover the entire hedge floor.
I doubt this was amateur simply based on everything else at the house is professional. I'm amateur! But not the people before me!
They do have at least two pipes together on each side, so, I assume the first pipe does half the bush while the other does the other half - but I don' know that for certain until I flush it with water to see what happens.
Generally they will use a small machine, sometimes walk-behind, that has the plow mounted in the middle. I've never seen one with the plow mounted off to the side, because it would constantly try to pull the machine off track, and you wouldn't be able to maintain a straight line.
The two pipes could very well two different installations. The first one failed so the second one was installed.
I use it a lot. I don't bury any of it, I just cover it with mulch. Why bury it? If they are running pipes down the sides it might be the irrigation syle with built in drippers. That's typically 1/4" though. You can also insert drippers directly into the 5/8 at each bush.
Frankly I woul dnot spend any time trying to figure out what's there isyou see that the pipe has holes in it and is old. Just start from scratch. I suggest the 1/4" with built in drippers for a row of bushes. Run 5/8" to one end and then run two pieces of 1/4" with drippers down each side. That's how I irrigate my row of blackberry bushes.
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