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There was a circular cap in the corner of the lawn that I had always assumed was a sprinkler, but didn’t know for sure. It had never worked since we had owned the house. I decided to investigate it to see if it could be fixed. The cap had rainbird written on it. There was no model number, but there was a patent number. When I Googled the patent number, it was a patent for an impact sprinkler. That made sense. After Googling Rainbird Impact Sprinklers, I found that it resembled the Rainbird Maxi-Paw, a pop up impact sprinkler. This was probably an earlier version of that sprinkler.
This was an impact sprinkler according to the patent number
So for step one, I started digging out the sprinkler to see where it was being fed from. Once I isolated the pipe that was connected to it, I could make sure that I was still getting water from that pipe.
Started things off by trying to see if it was connected
It occured to me to pry open the lid to see if there was a simple clog that could be cleaned out. That would save me alot of digging. When I pried open the top, I was shocked to find that the entire sprinkler assembly was filled with dirt and roots. Since the system was sealed, I had no idea how all of those roots had grown inside the sprinkler. It was literally packed with dirt and roots.
Sprinkler was completely plugged and filled with dirt and roots
I decided to finish digging out the sprinkler since I would need to do that to clean out the sprinkler anyway. As I dug around the sprinkler, I noticed that it was being fed from a pipe on the side of the sprinkler. I knew from the Maxi-Paw specs that it could take water in from either an outlet on the side, or one on the bottom. I was happy to see it was on the side since that would require less digging on my part.
Sprinkler is fed from the side by this PVC pipe
As I completely dug out the sprinkler, I decided to go ahead and cut the pvc to see if it was even getting water at all. I turned on each of my sprinkler zones, but none of them seemed to deliver water to that area.
Ok, now my problems doubled. Not only was the sprinkler full of dirt, and questionable if it would work, but now I also needed to find a way to get water to the sprinkler. I had recently hired a company to grind a bunch of tree roots that were coming across my lawn. I thought they were in an area away from all of my sprinkler pipes, but that didn’t turn out to be the case, as I had sprung some leaks in the middle of my lawn. I had patched them all, but apparently in the process, I had cut off water to this sprinkler. On the other hand, maybe it lost water long before that. At this point, it didn’t matter.
To start, I took on the easy task and cleaned out the sprinkler. Since I had cut the pvc that was feeding it, I could now pull it out of the ground. I took it to the back yard and sprayed it out with a garden hose, also using a long screwdriver to dig the roots and dirt out of it. It took awhile but I was able to clean it out. I had no idea if it would still work though.
Cleaned out sprinkler using hose and screwdriver
Next I needed to get water to my sprinkler. I saw the direction that the original PVC had come from, but the sprinklers in that direction were pretty far away. Instead, there was a sprinkler about 12 feet away along the edge of the lawn. There were only 3 other sprinklers on that zone so I didn’t think I would be over taxing it.
I had read about something called flex pipe (sometimes called funny pipe or swing pipe). Instead of PVC, which required straight runs, flex pipe allowed you to be more flexible. Since it flexed like a hose, you could run it either in a straight path, or a curved one. It was much easier to work with than PVC. Connecting to PVC was easy as well since there were connectors that let you screw one end onto the PVC adapter, and the other end could be pushed onto the rubber pipe. The connectors were very simple. You just push the ends onto the flex tube. It was very similar to drip irrigation parts. I bought all of my parts from Home Depot but the pipe and adapters are also available from Drip Depot.
Swing pipe to feed the sprinkler
Easy to use push on Flex Pipe connectors
So, the next step was to dig up the sprinkler that I was going to use as a water source. I assumed that it would have a standard riser connected to a PVC elbow joint. Unfortunately, since the PVC was so shallow, it had an elbow but it was facing down, then some quirky U joint to bring it back up and the sprinkler was attached to that. This was a classic example of where the installer should have used a swing assembly in order to lower the sprinkler head. You can see my blog here to show you how that works.
Source sprinkler with an odd connector set up
I decided not to mess with that entire set of parts, and instead I would tap into the PVC pipe before that with a T joint. I could then connect the flex pipe adapter directly to the T adapter.
Flex connector threaded into PVC adapter
Next came the part that took the longest time. I dug a trench from the source sprinkler to the one that I was fixing. That part of the lawn had not been watered in a long time, so there wasn’t much of a green lawn to try to preserve.
Trench for my Flex Pipe
I screwed in another one of my elbow adapters onto the side port of the sprinkler. It was the same one that I had used on the PVC T joint on the other end. I then measured the total length and cut a length of funny pipe accordingly. I pushed both ends of the flex pipe onto the adapters and put the sprinkler back in its spot, making sure that it was oriented as it was before. I had assumed that it worked at some point and that they had properly set the start/stop angles of the sprinkler.
Sprinkler PVC connector replaced by flex pipe connector
Final set up with both ends of flex pipe connected
It was time to test the sprinkler. I knew that the hard part would work, and that was bringing water to the sprinkler. The worst case now would be if the sprinkler didn’t work, but I could take care of that by buying a new impact sprinkler. I turned on the zone, and the sprinkler popped up and started working. It was even set correctly to cover the 90 degree corner that it was supposed to.
It works!
This impact sprinkler was great. It covered a huge section of my lawn that wasn’t being reached. Most of my pop up spray sprinklers had problems misting and would drift off even when there was only a small amount of wind. This sprinkler cut through the breeze and would cover 15-20 feet.
The flex pipe was also a great find for the project. I would definitely use it again on future projects. It was simple to use, and didn’t require glue to put it together. It didn’t need to follow a straight line like PVC requires and can be bent to fit the desired path. The project was a success and I was surprised that my clogged up sprinkler was able to be salvaged at the end of the day.
Video References
Here are a few videos that show how the flex pipe (funny pipe) is used.
A short simple video on how the funny pipe might be used. I would have probably used a swing assembly here but the funny pipe works here as well.
In this video, he does alot more work than I did, but it’s a really good learning video.
