Dan (
@Dan in Pasadena) kinda nailed it when he wrote:
"The only thing worse than not having sprinklers, is HAVING sprinklers!"
My sprinkler system has the flu or maybe Long Covid. Started with the indexing valve cover. Cured that and discovered a sprinkler at the end of the driveway was gushing water. It was one of the Toro 570 pop-up spray heads. The ring that screws onto the housing had been cut off and the guts of the sprinkler head scattered around. Screwed a new top and innards on the old housing and called it cured.
The big sections of my yard have large RainBird pop-up impact sprinkler heads but the smaller sections and edges of the yard have the smaller Toro 570 pop-up heads that work quite well to spray water in different patterns. They are meant to attach directly to 1/2" Tees in the underground PVC pipe system.
The guts include a pipe of varying lengths (this one is a 6-inch), a gray guide ring at the bottom, a spray head on top and a spring that keeps the spray head and pipe below ground when there is no water pressure in the system.
Today I discovered the 'cured' sprinkler head was gushing water again and the thing I thought I had screwed back on was no longer attached to the housing. I removed the housing from the ground and discovered the damage from the first case of sheared off head had damaged the threads on the housing.
Once you remove the housing from its hole in the ground, it's quite likely dirt will fall into the Tee and eventually clog the spray nozzle. I normally just screw the new housing in and turn on the sprinkler to flush it out. It's quick and easy to just screw the assembled sprinkler in the hole but that means the spray head might be pointing in the wrong direction. That gray ring prevents the spray head from rotating so the guts have to be pulled and after lining up the spray head, sliding it down into the housing and tightening the top ring. I end up being unable to unscrew the guts without rotating the housing so the whole mess comes out of the ground and I start over.
I thought Toro or someone else would have a wrench to install and tighten the housing into the Tee fitting. No luck so I grabbed that piece of wooden shovel handle and made my own wrench. Cut four slots in the wooden handle to line up with the four tabs inside the housing and voila, I have a custom tool.
It worked great to get the housing back in the hole and tightened on the underground fitting. Cycled the sprinkler system until it flushed out the housing before re-installing the new guts into the new housing.
Now that I have this tool, I need a way to remember what the hell it's for so I planed one side of the handle and put a label on it.
I'm so proud of myself I hurt my shoulder again trying to pat myself on the back. Put all the tools away, took the new labeled chunk of wood to the shed and put it in the sprinkler head cabinet. Last task of the day was to run the sprinkler system manually through its cycle. Something in the next section didn't look right. There was a dry patch next to the road and when I looked toward my neighbor's driveway, I saw aother sprinkler head gusher.
Back to the shed, retrieve the tool, rinse and repeat. It appears the sprinkler housing wasn't tightened and it popped off the few threads holding it in the Tee fitting.
I put the guts back in the housing and called it a day. I'll have to manually cycle the system again tomorrow to be sure the fixes hold.
