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A Quick Guide To Garden Irrigation Systems DIY

By designerwatering | March 25, 2019
garden irrigation systems diy | Designer watering

Basic Rules

When looking to to install garden or lawn sprinklers yourself, we take you back to basics on garden irrigation systems DIY. So what’s the first things that you need to do?

Garden Irrigation Systems DIY

  • Do your Bucket Test to determine how much water is available for use (see below).
  • You will not be able to water your whole yard in one go with the water from one small pipe. Your system will therefore have to be broken down into zones as shown in our Sample Design.
  • Visit the Sprinkler System Layout Guide page and note the ‘Head to Head’ minimum 100% overlap style of sprinkler layout.
  • Sketch your area, preferably ‘To Scale’, then position your Sprinkler heads with reference to the Sprinkler Layout Page.
  • If you have a Compass, mark in your Sprinkler’s watered area to better view your Layout, as most of your Sprinklers will water in a partial or full circle pattern.
  • Keep to similar Sprinkler styles within a zone. (e.g. try not to mix Pop-up Sprinklers with garden micros, or rotating with non-rotating Sprinklers etc)
  • Stay within a 30Lt/min flowrate for the 19mm Pipe, even if you have better flowrate results, as the faster moving water may cause blowouts. Refer to the Sprinkler Info page for your Lt/min Sprinkler head flowrates.
  • When purchasing, you may find Shopping Carts to be quite time consuming if searching for a lot of different components. So after you’ve done your Sprinkler selection and Grouping, it may be easier to Print and ‘hand complete’ our Parts List before going to the Cart. Once your shopping list is complete, you can then simply click on the item from the Parts List page, and you will be taken straight through to that item in the Shopping Cart.

Flow Rate:

  • When planning a watering system for your garden, you will need to know the flow rate of your water first. This will enable you to work out how many Sprinklers you can run at once from the Tap you will be using for your Sprinkler System.

How To Measure your Flow-Rate:

  • Grab a standard household bucket (usually 9 or 10 litres capacity)
  • Turn your Tap on full for maximum flow.
  • Put your bucket underneath the Tap.
  • Time how long the bucket takes to fill.

The Equation:

  • Divide the size of the bucket (e.g. 9 litres) by the time taken to fill (e.g. 18 seconds): 9 ÷ 18 = 0.5 lt/sec
  • Multiply the lt/sec result by 60 to give you litres per minute, and by another 60 for litres per hour.
  • Use no more than 80% of this figure, as using 100% would leave you with insufficient pressure to enable water to be propelled from the sprinklers.

Putting The Equation To Use:

  • Using 80% of 30 lt/min gives you 24 lt/min to use, which means if you have Sprinklers that require 8 lt/min or less to operate effectively, you could run 3 of these at once.
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