DIY Lawn Sprinklers

[1960 Rancher]

Well this all started with my wife complaining about her flowers dying everytime she plants them in the front mulched area. She never waters the area even though we frequently water the grass due to the house and lawn being two years old and not growing well and filled with weeds.

So I looked into a misting system and did not like the products available and started looking into a small sprinkler system for the mulched area.

Well after looking into sprinklers in general I decided to start a full yard sprinkler system. (just the front yard for now).

I basically have installed the Rain Bird 1804 heads with 8' nozzels. I will have about 10 heads on the mulched area zone. My water source is a well pump with the PSi set at 60 for the entire house.

What I cannot decide is if I should go with the smaller rotating heads for the yard...

Or go with a professional style of head like this.

I have a 3/4 acre lot but the front yard is only maybe a 1/4 acre if that. I created a scaled plot in CAD to perform the layout but unsure of layout for the types of heads other than spray coverage and overlap.

Plus I have the issue of the water source. I can keep the feed from the hose bib or run a dedicated 1" home run for the feed. With the small rotating heads the seem like they will work from the hose bib but the larger style may not.

 

[Gary Swart]

I don't know about your area, but here there are large irrigation supply companies that have designers on staff that will take your scale drawing and details about water supply and design a system for free providing you purchase all of your supplies from them, and their prices are actually on par with discount stores. Even if you had to pay a reasonable fee for the design, it would be worth it. Pipe sizing as well as type of sprinklers is somewhat scientific are is related to how much water is available and zones needed. Once done, it will last forever.

 

[Sponsor]

 

[Teamo]

You have a lot of options to look at. There are all types of rotary heads and spray heads. I prefer the Hunter PGP rotary heads for lawn areas. For the flower beds you could use a continuous drip line. I used some Rain Bird drip line and covered about 200' of flower beds along my fence line. It runs on about 30 psi. They sell a pressure reducer/filter that needs to be installed at the valve for the drip line. The new drip line is a lot more reliable than some of the old drip equipment that was used just a few years back. You have to run the drip zone for about an hour but it gets buried under the mulch and soaks right into the roots of the flowers. I also have some flower beds that I had originally set up with Rain Bird spray heads. I may eventually switch over to all drip line in the flower beds in the future. If you do use spray heads for flowers you should consider the types of plants that you will have in the bed. Some of my plants were tall and I changed the 4" sprays to tall riser 12" spray heads to spray over certain plants. There are lots of good sprinkler brands but I prefer Hunter and Rainbird for everything. You can find some stuff at the big box stores but they are limited in what they carry. I would suggest purchasing everything at an irrigation supplier or online. You can do lots of research on the internet as far as designing your system. Some of the web sites for the major sprinkler manufacturers offer free online help also.

 

[hj]

I doubt that you will find ANY rotating head that will ONLY throw the water 8'. The reason for using them is that they throw the water a long way because they use a single nozzle and rotate it to give coverage. The 'spray" nozzles use MANY openings so they do not have the distance of a rotary one.

 

[Ankhseeker]

I like the rainbird ones because you can change the nozzle to adjust for volume of spray as well. There are so many options. just make sure you do your homework and overlap.