# DIY Irrigation Plan



## jdaltman (May 23, 2020)

Looking for some help. I'm looking to do some DIY irrigation...finally got serious about taking care of my yard myself and I want to prevent what happened last year when we had drought conditions where my yard got fried (part of it still is and will need rehabbed in the Fall).

I'd like to put an above ground system that ideally would be hooked up to a timer and could live in my mulch beds. The mulch beds are highlighted in red. My front yard area that I'm looking to cover is 3800 square feet - pretty much a rectangle and my backyard is 2000 square feet, almost a perfect circle. I'm looking at building my own system where I would bury 1" poly pipe in my mulch beds then use adapters to hook into a 3 or 4 zone timer on my spigot. I was looking at the MP3500 or Rainbird 5000 for the front and maybe a smaller version for the back. I think I'm going to need 2 or 3 in the front to cover and 2 in the back. The other option I was looking at to keep it simple was daisy chaining Orbit H20-6 heads together on spikes in the mulch beds to water the yard. PSI is 55 off the spigot - I am going to get a GPM measurement shortly.

Looking for any advice or feedback. Would like to go to an inground system, but it's probably not in the cards this year. Below is a pic of the yard and areas I'm looking to cover.

*Don't mind that burned out side yard - this is the area being re-done this fall after not keeping up with watering and disease last summer 🙃


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## Vtx531 (Jul 1, 2019)

Looks like those rotors go about 30' so you would need five of them to cover the front. 
X...30'...X...30'...X...30'...X...30'...X
Without having anything on the street side you would still not get head to head coverage and likely have a lot of brown spots. Just make sure your expectations aren't too high.

You can learn a lot while doing this experiment and then maybe reuse some of the parts and materials when a full inground system is in the cards.

It's been a while since I did mine but 1" pipe seems bigger than you would need for this setup.


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## SodFace (Jul 17, 2020)

I have 4 orbit h2o now. When I chain 2 together I need to switch them from large to small opening to retain the range. I avoid medium as Tommy tester on YouTube did a nice analysis of the sprinkler and medium performed poorly in terms of uniformity...small and large were very good.

Will vary based on water pressure but if you need to go down from large setting the minutes watering per 1" of water goes up quite a bit. So I chain them or hook them up individually depending on the area.


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