Stopping a Leak in the Irrigation System for Water Conservation

Video Transcript

"I'm Cathi Pare, with water resources in Santa Barbara speaking to you today with expertvillage.com and we are actually looking at drip systems right now and maintenance you can do as a home owner. One of the first things you are going to do before your seasons watering starts and every month throughout the summer, you want to turn each of your drip zones on. One of the things with drip systems, is they are under the mulch and sometimes you can't just see when you turn it off where the problems was. I like to use flags. I stick them down in to the ground, I'm going to turn this off and we are going to come back. We just saw earlier and that is why we marked it with a flag that we've lost an emitter and in fact, this is it. It is just sitting next to the pipes. There is always a hole where it came from. You are going to the barbed end of this, find where the hole is and you have to work it in a little bit and you will hear it snap. When it reaches back in, there you go. That one is fixed. There are a couple of other tings that happen all the time in drip systems. The pipe seems to get cut with shovels pretty often because we are not seeing it; it is underground. I've got an example to show you. This is what the pipe looks like and most times to repair that cut they will use duct tape besides being ugly it doesn't work for very long. You are going to get what is called a connector. It is just a little piece of plastic and you can get it at your irrigation store or your hardware store. It has a barbed end. You cut the pipe piece that is broken, take your connector, takes a little bit of push power, you push it, you twist it and there you go, it's connected. If this were a cut pipe, I would then connect this piece of pipe into here. Your pipe is repaired, you are not leaking anymore, and you are back to having a efficient irrigation system for those nice watered beautiful flowers. "