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I had one sprinkler that sat in the area outside of my lawn in the middle of my plants. That had always seemed like a useless place for whoever did the installation to put the sprinkler. I didn’t think much of it since it never worked anyway. One day I did notice that a trickle of water was coming out of the sprinkler when its zone was turned on. It occurred to me that I could make use of the sprinkler by converting it to drip and to use it to water the surrounding plants.
Clogged sprinkler in the middle of our planter
I ordered the part that I needed from Drip Depot. They sold various heads that screwed onto the riser. Each had a different number of outlets and flow rates. They were all color coded so you knew exactly what you were buying. These were pressure compensating ports so each outlet had the same pressure output. They also had built in filters to prevent clogging. I settled on a 4 port outlet that emitted 6 PSI
Color coded drip adapters
Step one was to see if I was actually getting water to that riser. I screwed off the sprinkler head and decided on the non-subtle method by just turning on the sprinkler zone to see what happened. Water sprayed up and out of the riser with plenty of pressure. We were good to go.
Proving that the sprinkler has water by removing the head.
I applied some pipe tape to the riser and screwed on the drip manifold. Again, I tested things out by turning on the sprinkler zone. I had water out of all 4 ports. Great.
Flushing the manifold without emitters
Now I just attached the 1/4 inch drip hose to each outlet. I used a few T joints as well to water multiple plants on one outlet. Last, I added the emitters to the 1/4 hose. I like using the 2GPH emitters. They release enough water for the plants in the relatively short time that the sprinklers are on. That is, unlike a normal drip system, it won’t be on for more than 10-15 minutes.
Using 2 GPH emitters on each port
If you want to water more than 4 plants, you can always split one or more of the drip tubes. You can attach a T- splitter, or a 4 way splitter in order to water more plants. Since I had chosen the 6GPH manifold, I could easily supply 3 2GPH emitters from the single hose.
Using T splitters to get multiple emitters out of each port
Note that you can also purchase drip support stakes and also small landscape staples in order to hold the emitter in place exactly where you want it.
Use lawn staples and an emitter stake to hold the emitter in place
I was happy that I was able to make use of an otherwise useless sprinkler. I ended up with 3 of these drip conversions around my plants and they are working great.
