Irrigation tweaks

A picture tells a thousand words? So here is about half a billion swear words...

First go-around was to try and adjust what is (was) currently in place.
They have a mix of rotors and sprays, the rotors are new to me and it took a bit for me to figure out what the three adjustments on the top of the head where doing (Spray pattern, something unknown, right-hand side rotation reverse point (think 360 deg or less). The left-hand side turn-around position is set by multi-grips twisting the whole unit in the mount on the ground. No, that's not some crap I just made up, it's what the manual actually tells you to do! And yes, I had to grind my way past about 15 YouTubes to finally find the PDF and RTFM.

Why the Driza-Bone? Because the water here is really really really - painfully - cold. My guess is it's because the mains water pipes are deep underground. Much deeper than at Temecula. My skin / nervous / mental system just does not enjoy being stabbed with zillions of razor-sharp drops of cold water while doing something I don't want to do.

So, round one helped, but it didn't even come close to fixing the core issues of really hopeless coverage.
I fully plan to get the drone in the air, but I don't have time for that sort of fun at the moment, so no aerial shots of the dead spots on the lawn. *

• Pre-post update. I was on the roof cleaning out the gutters and fixing other stuff when I took this picture of the dead spots in the front yard. Once again, this blog lags reality, so the dead spot in the middle is actually smaller when the picture was taken vs me doing the initial adjustment in the Driza-Bone. ie, it's working. I'm shrinking the brown with liquid green.

Reason they are dead is pretty easy to figure - no water is hitting them.
Clearly, time for a rotor upgrade.
If a little is good, more is always better. Mostly. Sometimes.

I've come to prefer the rotor water drop method over the spray mist method for delivering green-enhancing fluid to the lawn.
The current small rotors are Ok for up-close green splotches, but in both the front and back yards, the middles were dead. Needed more reach.

You can see how much deeper you have to dig the hole and line to get the bigger rotors in the same location.

Here is a photo of the throw of water straight out of the unit.
I have come to adjust it to throw a little more to the sides to try and even things out a bit more than what you see here. But regardless, you get the idea of just how it can move the water from the edge of the lawn where the unit is placed to the middle bits.

The new, bigger rotors have a lot more throw, so while they take a bit of digging, they are a lot easier to adjust and really put the water where it's needed, in my case, the middle of the lawn.

Beyond that, it's just been a case of repairing, relocating, and most of all, leveling, the ones that are there.
Many of the existing ones are at wonky angles, so they shoot into the lawn rather than out around/over the lawn for about 1/4 of their rotation.

But, of course, even leveling some of the units has been unexpedly challenging, which is a PG way of saying really annoying!
This guy was the most annoying. That's 1 inch line, so it's not very flexible. Had to dig a fair way on either side to try and pack dirt under the line to change the angle of the head.

For those that were just too low, it was a pretty straightforward dig and lift.

This one was also un-fun. The person that had put it in had used a heat gun to (try and) soften the line before they jammed the 90 deg barb to 3/4 inch thread adaptor on the end. The problem is they used to much heat and it curled the end of the pipe over and they did not get the heat far enough back down the line, so the barb only went in 1 of the 3... And guess what... Had I not dug it up, I would not have found that it was leaking from this 'joint'.
So yeah, boil the kettle (Yes, its a noisy one) and pour water over the pipe back far enough that I can get all 4 barbs into the pipe and thus stop the leak.. Oh, and yes, totally replaced this spray-style head with a mini rotor. It needed more reach to get the patio garden and up to the 'new' shop path (blog on that project soon).

Why am I doing all this?
I want to conserve water. I am confident that I have reduced the amount of water being used through two main changes.
1. Getting less spray blowing away in the afternoon wind.
2. Blocked off about 4-5 heads totally.
While they don't seem to have any water restrictions in play up here, I still want to be mindful of our liquid resources. (Yes, it's a guess I've reduced the total volume per water session. And yes, I've looked up the model number of our water meter, and while it runs on 915MHz, it's using custom encryption, and so I can't read it with an SDR (software defined radio) like I am with the gas meter - blog on that one coming.)
Lastly, the grass in Temecula was really hard and rough. It was never really 'green'. Even with the HOA yelling at us to keep the 'lawn' watered, it was just not nice to lie on it or 'hang out' on it since it was tough and caused red skin irritation if you even sat on it, and most of all, we did not have any shady trees.
Here is very different. I will blog about the two apple trees shortly, but the one that currently does not have any fruit on it is really really nice to chill under in the afternoons around dinner time. The lawn is really nice and green and is soft enough to just lie on and hang out.
Lastly, some of the best sounding (yet to be proven) advice I have been given about living up here is not to fight the seasons, but go with each of them and enjoy each for all they can offer. So for summer, that means hanging out on the lawn under a shady tree. The key to that is to water it efficiently.