Drip Irrigation Move - Part 1

I moved my Drip Irrigation System this weekend.

Previously, I had hooked my Drip Irrigation System to the outdoor faucet in my backyard. I only have one faucet in my backyard, so I had installed a 4-way water distributor (see picture to the right) to the faucet. This allowed me to connect the Drip Irrigation System and still get water from the faucet for other purposes.

Unfortunately, the 4-way water distributor started leaking pretty badly. I did not want to buy another one because it was somewhat expensive (over $20) and only lasted 2 years.

However, without the water distributor, I would have to go inside the house to get water everytime I needed it.

There was a sprinkler system installed in part of my backyard that I was not using. Drip Irrigation is much more efficient way to distribute water to plants than sprinklers, so I had deactivated the sprinkler and put in drip irrigation to water in that area of the backyard.

Fortunately, the sprinkler system still worked, so I decided to move my Drip Irrigation system to take adavantage of the sprinkler system.

The backyard sprinkler system only had 2 sprinklers attached to it. One of the sprinklers would be used for the Drip Irrigation System. The other sprinkler had to be capped off so that the water would not come out when when the Drip Irrigation System was activated.

I unscrewed the unneeded sprinkler. There was a short (2") plastic riser that attached the sprinkler to the PVC pipe. I removed riser and replaced it with a longer (6" riser) and put a cap on top of the new riser. I wanted the cap near soil level so that I would always know where the PVC pipe ended, in case I wanted to put the sprinkler back in.

I did the same thing at the other sprinkler. Only this time, I attached a 2' plastic riser at the end of the PVC pipe (see figure at the left). I needed the extra length to provide enough room for the Drip Irrigation system.

The sprinkler system used 1/2" PVC pipe, so I used a 1/2" diameter riser.

The Drip Irrigation System attaches to a faucet, so I had to use a PVC riser to Faucet converter.

The picture to the left shows the converter attached to the plastic riser. The converter has the added benefit of being a right angles to the plastic riser.

I have two Drip Irrigation zones. One zone is for my container plants. The other zone is for my Raised Bed plants.

The plants in the container do not require as much water as the plants in the Raised Bed, so creating seperate zones allows me to tailor the watering for each type.

I use a Y-hose adapter to create two faucet connections. The picture to the left shows the Y-hose adapter connected to the plastic riser to faucet converter. Without the Y-hose adapter, I could only connect one Drip Irrigation zone to the water outlet

Drip Irrigation Move - Part 2