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A new garden irrigation system with pop-up sprinklers was installed to water newly installed turf as part of a complete frontyard landscaping project.
Finished front
The project
We were having new lawn laid to complete our front landscaping project so I thought I would install a pop-up sprinkler system to water it. I took pictures as I went to show how to do it. In the end I was so pleased that I added one for the back lawn too!
Steps
Step 1
Planning it out. Pope have a pretty handy step-by-step guide on their web page. It shows you how to plan out either a rectangular lawn (our back lawn) or an irregular-shaped lawn (our front lawn). However here are the steps to follow.
1. Measure out your lawn area and make a diagram of your project. Then, using the radius of each sprinkler from the Pope website you can plan out how many sprinklers you need.
The pictures on the Pope website indicate that you need a lot more sprinklers such that there are areas of lawn that are covered by four overlapping sprinklers. I thought this was overkill so I planned out sprinklers along one side only not both sides.
2. Calculate the flow rate from the tap that will supply the sprinkler system. The website shows you how, but basically you time how long it takes to fill a known volume into the bucket and use that to calculate the flow in litres/minute.
3. Write down how much water each sprinkler uses. For the 'Professional' pop-ups the numbers are:
- Quarter circle = 3 Litres/min
- Half circle = 6 Litres/min
- Three quarter circle = 10 Litres/min
- Full circle = 11 Litres/min
4. If your available water flow is enough for the sprinklers you need, then great! For the front I had over 50 Litres/min available (the tap is right off the water supply from the road) and I needed 1 x half + 2 x quarter and 2 x Precision (each set at a third circle) so I figured around 20 Litres/min needed. For the back however the tap only put out around 20 Litres/min and I needed 30 Litres/min for the sprinklers, so I had to divide the back sprinkler system into two zones of 15 Litres/min each (see later).
5. Measure the water pressure at your tap. You can pick a gauge up from Bunnings. You can see that my water pressure is nearly 600kPa which will damage the sprinkler system. For pop-up sprinklers you want a pressure of 100-300kPa so you'll need a 300kPa pressure reducer. Don't get the 100kPa pressure reducer, these are for low pressure systems such as drip irrigation.
Step 2
Dig a trench. This is the annoying part, so don't make life any harder than you need to. The 50mm pop-ups will rise up 50mm, so unless your lawn is very long that should be fine. The sprinklers come in other heights eg. 75mm, but that just means you need to dig a deeper trench. Make sure you measure how tall the system is once you combine the sprinkler, connector, and poly tubing as the 50mm sprinkler housing was ~70mm, and the tubing is 19mm, for a total depth of 9-10cm.
Step 3
Make a start. I found putting together the start of the sprinkler system surprisingly tricky. At the start you need to put together these components:
- The pressure reducer (screws directly onto the tap)
- The filter (does not connect to the pressure reducer, so you need a short length of tubing).
You want the filter to be accessible as this catches any debris out of the tap so you want to be able to take this apart now and again to check +/- clean it.
Once you add all of these components together however, the length adds up.
The problem of course is that taps aren't really that high off the ground.
With the double adapter to the tap I bought I thought the connections sat quite well. However the force bending the short length of tubing between the pressure reducer and the filter meant that water leaked at these connections.
I fixed this by changing the connections as above using an angled connector. I later shortened the tubing a bit between the components to raise the filter off the ground and make it more accessible.
Step 4
Put it together. Now for the fun part. Putting the whole system together was pretty easy and very satisfying. It is important to do this first above ground so that you can test it, make sure everything works, and check for any leaks BEFORE you bury it underground!
You want each sprinkler to be placed at the edge of the radius of throw of the previous. So for a 4m throw that means the sprinklers are set 4m apart such that two adjacent sprinklers overlap each other. As you can see from my diagram the lawn was quite irregular but could be covered (I thought) using a quarter at each end, a half for the straight part, and two 'Precision' sprinklers (whose radius of throw can be adjusted) for where the lawn goes around the corner.
Use 19mm tubing for standard home pop-ups. 13mm is for low pressure systems, and 25mm is for larger throw rotor sprinklers. Pope don't make poly tubing so they say to just buy it from another brand, I used Holman.
Use the metal Loc-Sure clamps for pop-up systems, not the plastic locking clamps, due to the higher pressure.
When pushing the connectors into the poly tubing it is MUCH easier if you heat the end of the tubing in a thermos of boiling water for a few seconds. It makes the tubing softer and the connector just slides in. Make sure you slide the loc-sure clamp over the tubing first though!
To secure the loc-sure clamp, just squeeze with pliers.
If you have to remove a clamp, using pincer pliers.
Thread tape is recommended to be added where the sprinklers are screwed onto the 15mm threaded connectors. You'll never see this again so make sure it is screwed on tight with no leakage when you test it.
Once everything is together, put it in the trench and test everything before you bury it. When you do fill in the trench make sure that the top of the sprinklers sit just at the top of the cut lawn so that you don't hit them with your lawnmower.
Step 5
Adjusting the sprinklers. I struggled to find information about this. For the 'Professional' pop-ups, you can adjust the radius of throw (how far the water spray reaches). To do this, turn the metal screw on the top of the sprinkler. They come with the screw fully out (maximum throw) so you only need to adjust it if you want to reduce the radius of throw for some reason. To adjust where the spray goes, pull up the black pop-up and rotate it. It will click as you turn it, turn until the marked area of spray falls where you want it to go. Don't turn the top of the grey pop-up housing, this has to be screwed on tight otherwise it will leak here. You only want to unscrew this to remove the pop-up, to either replace it if it gets damaged or to clean the small filter inside it.
The 'Precision' sprinkler is different. You cannot adjust the radius of throw, which I found to be around 5 metres. Instead, turning the screw on the top adjusts how much of the circle you spray, anywhere from 0 degrees to 360 degrees.
Step 6
Check the coverage. At first I was pretty stoked, everything looked great!
However then I noticed that the front right of the picture above wasn't covered. Sure enough when I turned the water off there was a dry area at this corner.
At this point of my irregular lawn (from left to right at the bottom of this picture) the lawn (currently just dirt) is closer to 4.5m. Though the 'Professional' pop-up describes a max radius of throw of 4m I found this to be more like 3.5m. With this new value in mind I redid my initial diagram (this time I scanned the picture into my computer and used Powerpoint to draw the spray patterns so that I could play around with it).
This showed me that adding one more quarter sprinkler in the corner would provide the coverage that I needed. I therefore had to dig a new trench across the bottom of this picture and connect a length of poly tubing to supply one more quarter sprinkler to cover the dry corner.
This fixed the issue nicely, and wasn't too difficult to add.
Step 7
The finished front lawn. Here is the final look.
Despite my initial apprehension I must say that the whole thing was surprisingly easy and took me just a day. I'm now looking forward to summer so that I can turn it on and have a beer while my lawn is watered.
Step 8
Back lawn. Feeling inspired I decided to add a system to the back lawn which is a nice easy rectangular shape.
However, I faced two new problems:
- Though the water pressure from the tap at the back of the house was still nearly 600kPa, the flow rate was now only around 20 L/min. I needed 2 x quarter and 4 x half for a total of 30 Litres/min to cover the lawn. This meant that I had to divide the back irrigation into two zones, each needing 15 Litres/min.
- The second problem is that we have a dog, who cannot access the front lawn but lives out the back. Therefore I had to ensure that the pop-ups were set low in the lawn and that the connections were not accessible to the dog, otherwise he would happily chew and destroy them. The solution was that both zones were brought out at the right end of the diagram above, coming through the sleepers. That way I can simply connect the hose to one zone then the other, and the dog can't get to the connectors.
This wasn't difficult, I just used a 25mm spade drill bit to drill through the sleeper.
You can get fancy with your zones and install solenoids (electronic valves) controlled by an automatic timer. But that sounded difficult and expensive and this was fine for me.
Then it was just dig the trench.
Then put the system together, place it in the trench, and test that it works without leakage.
Because the height of the pop-ups needed to be perfect I used gravel to sit under the pop-ups so that I could adjust their height to just where I needed.
Tools and materials
Materials used in the project:
- Pop-up sprinklers
- 300kPa pressure reducer
- In-line filter
- Pipe connectors
- Metal loc-sure clamps
- Poly pipe
- Water pressure gauge
- Thread tape.
Tools used in the project:
Help and inspiration for your watering system project
Bunnings Workshop member Prawns installed a front yard automatic sprinkler system.
Community member MrBJDavis built an upcycled self-watering greenhouse. housing wicking planters.
Experienced member Adam_W has shared guides How to water your garden and How to install a drip irrigation system, while community member Simon's How to install a simple irrigation system should also be very helpful.
