Feels like a job for a hand spade. More surgical and less chance of cutting a water line.
Keep in mind that Iāve never personally done this operation but this would be my approach.
Looks like that sprinkler head doesnāt come with the nozzle included. So you will need to get a compatible nozzle. Youāll want your new nozzle to match the spray pattern of the old one. Usually 360 for the middle of the lawn, 180 if it sits on the side or 90 in a corner. If you get a little dirt in the water line, just run the sprinkler without the nozzle installed and it will flush itself out.
The Toro sprinklers are the one I use. Buy that and a head 90, 180 or 360. The heads come in different colours to indicate flow rate. I use the brown head.
Use a hand spade to dig around the sprinkler. Unscrew the old one. Screw in the new one.
Turn on the sprinkler, water will squirt out of the red thing, this flushes out any dirt that may have got in the pipe. Turn off water.
Pull up red thing. Unscrew red thing while holding the black riser so it does not drop down. Screw in your new head.
Test sprinkler. Job done.
The patient is open
You cursed me with this thread. Iāve replaced 15 of these things this year and repaired some broken lines too. This year more than doubles my lifetime total and itās all your fault, probably.
Can you discuss this? I think one of my lines may be broken
I had a big āsoft spotā that was flooded from underneath. Just started digging in the area and found the line, a tree root had pushed it until it cracked. Repairing the line was a bit of a challenge since itās not very flexible, hard to get it into place with the coupling on each end. Having a telescoping coupling on one of the ends was helpful, but still challenging. Warming/softening the line with a torch was also helpful, easier to get things to fit together when the plastic is warm.
My sprinkler line was more than 2ā deep for some dumb reason so I was doing all of this at the bottom of a fairly deep hole.
Finally got everything repaired and buried again. Iāve done this process twice and Iām still pretty bad at it.
Thatās annoying. I fixed one in the spring on a poly pipe. Simple fix. It was about 6-8ā deep. I cut out the leaking section and spliced in new semi-flexible pipe using a barbed coupling insert fixture (I canāt remember what the name of the piece was). It took about two hours - and now that Iāve done it once, I could probably cut that time in half (maybe quicker) next time.
Yeah, thatās ridiculous for them to bury it over 2ā deep. Iād be tempted to abandon it and start overāespecially if it becomes prone to failure.
It went that bad, eh?
āI wonder if I can use the point of this shovel to figure out how deep the PVC is.ā
One thing to be careful of when digging around PVC is that the electrical wires running to the solenoid could be running next to or taped to the PVC.
I learnt this the hard way and had to repair the broken PVC and reconnect the electrical cables.
āIm pretty sure thatās an old, abandon gas line and donāt need to worry about piercing it. Let me just light this cigarette firstā
Well the hole kept refilling with water every 10 minutes until I turned off the supply.
As of right now Iām ten inches deep digging through clay with a hand trowel ā¦fun times
I use the full size spade, but somewhat cautiously. Any resistance gets visual confirmation before I push through.