Now that I live in Idaho I have a number of new things I get to experience. I got to experience one this weekend. That is a blowout.
What is a blowout you may ask? Well, our yards here are all watered using irrigation water. We get that via sprinklers here, and not flood irrigation like I was used to in Arizona with friends I had.
Well, once it gets cold they turn our irrigation water off, and that happened last week. The next step is getting ready for the freezing temperatures is that everyone has to have their irrigation lines blown out. They call this – “Blowouts”.
This is done by hooking a compressor up to the water lines and blowing air through all the water lines until no more water comes out of one’s sprinkler, drip lines, etc. Most people do this by hiring a company to come to their house with a compressor and such and doing it for them.
I thought to myself, I own a compressor so I can do this myself. I watched some videos and I was sure I could do it myself. I had to get a valve system to go between my compressor and the water line hook up. I looked into building it myself and I also looked online for prebuilt ones. After pricing the parts out I found that the one on Amazon was cheaper than anything I could build so I bought one.
And this weekend I preformed the blowout. I had to make an extra trip to Lowes to get an adaptor for the blowout adaptor because my water line hookup was pipe thread and the adaptor I bought was designed for hose threads. Once I got that all put together I started things up.
It was really nice to have my Rachio web-based sprinkler timer because I was able to turn the thing on and off without having to be in the yard and getting wet. Also, I could be out front or back when turning on a section of yard.
I started in the front and ended in the back. I turned the water on and water shot out of all the sprinklers in that zone until just 1 had water coming out of it. Then I turned it off and back on, and I had to do that a few times. Water kept coming out of one sprinkler every time. And then I noticed that I was having issues getting the sprinklers to come up all the way. I went to my compressor and found that the pressure was falling quickly, and it was running constantly. Well, there is so much air coming out of the other sprinkler heads that the pressure in the compressor tank couldn’t say up. So, I had to turn off the water and allow the compressor to fill back up.
Note – The water valves are all in the back yard.
It took a lot longer than I thought it would to do this. The two zones in the front yard took about an hour and a half on Saturday to get blown out. I was able to also get the drop system all done (I hope/think). I also hit each of my 3 backyard zones once before I had to get in for the evening. On Sunday I did the front again and sure enough more water came out of one of the zones. Then I focused on the backyard and just cycled through them allowing each to have water settle before hitting them again. It went faster in the backyard, but there is a lot less water line in the backyard since everything is in the backyard for turning it on and running it. I spent another 45 minutes to finish things out.
Overall it went well just took longer than I expected. I hope I got all/enough of the water out of the lines so that nothing freezes and breaks over the winter. That is the reason you do this after all.
Here are a couple pictures I took, but I realized I never took a picture of the water spraying out – maybe next year.
