Saturday, May 15, 2021

Digging up the back half of the front yard: Putting it all back

 With all the rock removed from the front yard, and the sprinkler line to Zone 11 put back, we can now fill in the holes with the piles of dirt. 


This took a week of work, and then was delayed by rain, which made the dirt too wet to work.

But we kept at it and after weeks of moving dirt, we have it all leveled out.


Thursday, May 13, 2021

Zone 11 water supply

When we started to work on the front yard, we destroyed the sprinkler system.  There were two zones in the front yard -- zone 10 from the sidewalk to the neighbors and zone 11 from the sidewalk to the driveway.  Although we only worked on zone 10, the water supply line for zone 11 went across the yard

and so it was removed too.


 Now that the rock and stump excavation is complete, we need to put this water supply  line back.

On the sidewalk side, we have a 1 inch PVC pipe to attach to.

This pipe is 15 inches below the top of the rock wall, which should eventually be the top of the soil.

On the other end, we have the end of the water supply line.  This is a 1.5 inch PVC pipe that (at the moment) has a 90 degree turn and a reducer to take it down to a 1 inch PVC.

This is 21 inches below the top of the wall.

And the two ends are roughly 30 feet apart.


We will need 30 feet of 1 inch PVC, plus a valve to control the water flow, and the connectors to put it all together.

We went to 3 different stores to get all the various pieces we needed ($40.73 + $6.32 + $21.11 = $68.16).  Then we finished digging the trench from one end to the other, using a string to make it straight.  It was about 20 inches deep.

Connection at the one end was fairly easy; we just had to adjust the angle of the joint.


Then we could lay the pipe from that end to the other.


The other end was more complex.  We had to reduce the pipe from 1.5 inches to 1.0 inches, turn it to run across the yard and add the valve to control the flow.  We bought the same model of valve as we used for zone 10.

 Then we attached the electrical wiring that runs back to the controller box in the garage, and put a cover over it.


At this point we had all sorts of problems.  I put the valve in backwards -- there are arrows which say which way the water flows -- so I had to take it out and turn it around.  Then there was a leak right at the sidewalk where it looked like a shovel had sliced thru part of the pipe, so it had to be repaired/replaced.  Finally, it turns out that the wiring for zone 10 and zone 11 was reversed, so it needed to be fixed.

But finally, everything seemed to work, so it could all be buried.