Would you ever trench out your back lawn as a gift to your husband? No?? Well that is exactly what I did for Chad a few months ago at the beginning of December.
When we first moved into our house it was an old horse ranch full of a ton of dirt. A friend that initially came over to visit even made a joke saying it seemed like they stepped into the movie Interstellar during the dust bowl! Needless to say we had our work cut out for us.
Slowly over about 5 years we started manicuring lawns, adding road base, making decomposed granite pathways and really bringing our backyard to life.
A few summers ago we revamped our back deck that overlooks our property and we finally feel like we have to oasis we have craved. One of the main regrets about this space was the fact that we chose a “wavy” border for our grass cut out. What seemed to be a great idea at the time, has been the cause of sprinkler overspray or dead spots in the corners.
Being married to a man that takes utter pride in his yard, this has always been a huge annoyance of his! So this past winter I had an idea for a Christmas present that he would never expect and absolutely love!
I came across the company Irrigreen. They created a sprinkler system that basically “3D prints” water onto your lawn. Such a perfect solution for areas that have deeper corners or odd shaped lawns. It also cuts down your water usage as it doesn’t have overlap in coverage or overspray. The system also is controlled by an app on your phone via Wi-Fi so Chad can easily manage the sprinkler right from his phone! A dream of his!
So I waited until Chad went to work at the hospital so that I could have an entire day to secretly install the system!
Since our grass is essentially a square with a bunch of weird rounded edges, I was able to go from 5 mechanical sprinkler heads in this one area down to one Irrigreen digital head.
DIY Sprinkler System Install
I started out by digging a trench from the center of my grass where I would exchange the current mechanical head for the new digital head. I dug the trench out from under our deck where I was going to mount the new Controller box and made sure the trench was at least 10” deep. This will be where the Controller Cable will be housed, one end connected to the digital sprinkler head and the other to the Controller box.
We happened to have a rouge gopher that chewed through one of our PVC pipes somewhere under the DG and I wanted to avoid having to find this issue. I decided to cap all of the existing water lines and just run a new PVC pipe from the new sprinkler head to the main water line near the old valve box, just one trench that would house the PVC water line and cable for the digital head!
This was by far the most labor intensive portion of the project but only because we had gopher wire under this grass! Once dug it was a matter of playing with oversized legos, AKA PVC pipes!
After the digging was done, I glued all my 3/4” PVC together using liquid cement and cuplers/elbows to make my way from the sprinkler location to the valve box. I made sure to turn the water on quickly to clear the PVC line and ensure no dirt was in the line prior to connecting it to the sprinkler.
Next I connected the controller cable to the sprinkler head and ran it in the trench to the controller box and connected it there as well.
After that, I was able to fill the trench back in followed by the grass patches I saved to make the shock of me installing this a little less for Chad! I must say he didn’t even notice when he came home from work that night!
Once installed you download the app and connect the system so that it can calibrate the sprinkler to your PSI. Next you draw the map of your grass area and I let Chad dial it in so that it hits all edges and corners of our grass perfectly! You literally draw your grass out on the app and the sprikler head sprays to the edges as you adjust to make the perfect shape. He felt like he was playing a video game and absolutely loved it!
Overall it was worth the work and keeping it a surprise made is so fun. Irrigreen’s system has been so great for our mishaped lawn. It is so cool that we can also control the sprinklers on the go from our phone. If we are traveling we can check in on our grass or if it starts to rain we can easily adjust everything from the app!
Do you think this is something you would ever attempt? Like with all my DIYs, it is more intimidating than difficult. Anyone can do it and if not, they have people that can install for you!
If you are interested in checking Irrigreen out, you can get a free quote where they pull up google images of your lawn to map it out and show you just how many digital heads you would need. We only needed one head! They called it the California special!
I also have a DISCOUNT CODE by clicking here to get $500 off!
