This is Broken (Sprinklers)

Our water usage and distribution system in California is broken in many ways.  Most of them you and I can do little to fix.  Those of us who have sprinklers can do one small (or not so small) thing: adjust our sprinklers and repair leaks.  You wouldn't waste water in such an egregious way as to have a broken sprinkler or pipe spewing water all over, would you?  Or would you?  I wouldn't.  But I did.

Can you see the flood?  Neither could I.  It was behind the leftmost Cypress, and neatly draining into the bay.

When I decided to tune up my sprinklers two weeks ago (and fix the one that had a little spew from the rubber seal around the pop-up...which I noticed last summer and didn't fix...)  I discovered a break in the line that was sending a small river across the bed and straight into the drain.  It was forceful enough that the rest of the sprinklers in that zone were at half mast.  I had been wondering why my roses were drying out.  There was no evidence of the flood a few minutes after the sprinklers turned off.  It could have been going on for months.

I can repair or replace a sprinkler body.  But this job was beyond me.  I made an emergency call to a gardener who does heavy jobs for me.  He chopped out a six-inch-thick Italian Cypress root that had broken the pipe.  The system is twenty-six years old; the next break is only a matter of time.

Just another broken sprinkler.  Nothing to see here.  Move along.
From allianceforwaterefficiency.org.

Juan Garcia, Water Use Efficiency Specialist at the Irvine Ranch Water District (and a sprinkler tech geek) says sprinklers should be checked monthly.  Yeah, right. Perhaps you have a gardener or service that is supposed to be attending to these things.  If you ask them when was the last time they checked all the sprinklers...  what response do you think you will get?

At my church, whose members want to be totally PC and green, and which had been publishing "water saving tips" in the weekly email for months, I invited the maintenance folks to check the sprinklers with me.  "The gardeners do that, right?"  Yeah, right.

The ad hoc Church sprinkler maintenance team: me, Lyle and Nancy, with nifty clipboards to note and diagram problems.

This is a get-down-and-dirty kind of job.  For all but the smallest yard, it requires at least two people, one at the sprinkler controller and one checking the sprinklers, and a couple of cell phones. 

Lyle, an engineer, manned the sprinkler controller. It helps to be an engineer to operate these contraptions.  How many programs are you running for your different hydrozones?  Do you cycle and soak? Seasonal adjust?

You get to discover where all the zones are.  Twenty-four, in this case; probably close to three hundred sprinklers.  Some are set to run, but we cannot find them.  Underground?  We may never know.  We discovered two zones with such bad breaks they had little pressure.  And a couple of geysers.  About typical, I'd guess.

A minor geyser in back of the sanctuary.

A couple of sprinklers were aimed at the sidewalk or the building.  And a whole bunch of old sprinkler bodies had water welling out of them and flooding one spot or another. Nothing unusual.

This doesn't look like much water till you see it flowing thirty feet down the sidewalk. The broken sprinkler body is below grade.

We discovered some mystery hose that had drip emitters, at the base of patio trees.  The emitters emitted little or nothing, but the trees were huge, suggesting that they had broken the tubing under the patio. We have no way to repair that.  Hopefully the cement will not be undermined. Keep that in mind when somebody suggests underground irrigation.

Happy tree, useless emitter.  We don't even know which zone is watering these trees.

Even when everything is repaired and tuned, some waste is inherent in the design of our irrigation systems.

These sprinklers are working fine, adjusted fine...and watering the sidewalk anyway.

Waste is built into our irrigation in other ways.  We run our sprinklers in the wee hours, so we don't see any leaks unless they wash away a hillside.  Wealthy neighborhoods install drains in lawns and gardens, so there is no telltale puddle to indicate a break or overwatering.   Even when sprinklers are working properly, the soil saturates (in about three minutes with regular sprinkler heads), and water then goes from the irrigation system straight into the drain. I had never seen drains in home yards till I moved to SoCal. In the rest of the world yards gently slope away from the foundation of the house to the street so you can see if you're wasting water, and not have to worry about the drain plugging and your house flooding (as ours did years ago.) 

Can you see the drain?  Neither could I till I redid the landscaping two years ago and discovered drains I never knew I had.  

A few days later I met with a friendly young man named Eddie from the church's expensive landscaping service to show him our findings.  It turns out we pay extra for all repairs, which means we will let the service handle the line breaks and sprinkler body replacements, and we volunteers will do everything else.  I asked Eddie from the expensive landscaping service how often they checked for sprinkler problems.  He said that the "mow and blowers report anything they see."  In other words, never, unless there is a mudslide.

Seth Godin gave a TED talk in 2010 called "This is Broken," inviting people to point out things in our society that are designed or maintained badly, sometimes to the point of absurdity.  I nominate our obscure and labyrinthine Southern California sprinkler systems as fundamentally broken, not only  in implementation, but in their very design.

So we fix what we can.  It's time to roll up your pant legs and check those sprinklers.  Call a gardener to repair if you don't want to attempt it yourself.  If the gardener comes, you can have him show you how to work the controller so that you will  be ready to adjust it for minimum water use and minimum waste– more on that later.

It's a wet job.  I'd rather be gardening, or Beer Watering.

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