- The myGarden sprinklersystem planner is a free online tool that provides you with an automatic placement of sprinklers and piping perfect for your garden. It is based on the GARDENA Sprinklersystem products that provide convenient pop-up lawn irrigation. The pop-up sprinklers are permanently installed underground and connected via a pipe system.
- Download Free MEP Calculation Excel Sheets, AutoCAD Drawings, and Training Courses for HVAC, Firefighting, Plumbing and Electrical Systems Design. Download a Collection of Firefighting Design Excel sheets For fire sprinkler systems design.
- NaanDan Jain Irrigation System Software (NAANCAT) is another free irrigation design software for Windows. This software helps you find the right pieces of equipment for your irrigation system like pipe, sprinklers, button drippers, drip tapes, and more. To suggest the right set of equipment, this software asks your requirements and then suggests you the best set of equipment of a particular category that you can use in irrigation.
Sprinkler Design free download - Logo Design Studio, Autodesk Design Review, Web Design in Seven Days, and many more programs.
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7 Basic Steps to Designing Your Residential Sprinkler System
There are seven necessary steps you need to include when you draw up your irrigation system’s design. They include:
1. Measure and prepare the area for the sprinkler system: For this job, you’ll need graph paper, a pencil and a tape measure. Measure the length and width of your property. Then draw it to scale, for example, by using one inch to equal 10 ft. In your drawing, you need to include all landscape and hardscapes as well as other barriers, such as walkways, your driveway, your house, outdoor sheds.
2. Determine your water supply: Ask your local water authority to send you your property’s water pressure report. It’s also wise to check your water’s pressure throughout your house because it can vary from one spot to another. For example, you can determine your outdoor water pressure by using a water gauge:
- Turn off all the water inside your home
- Next, hook up the water gauge to your outdoor spigot
- Then, turn on your outdoor spigot to full blast to measure your water’s output.
You also need to measure your gallons per minute (GPM). You can measure your GPM by putting a one-gallon bucket and turning on your outdoor spigot full blast. Measure the time it takes to fill that one-gallon container. Take the time, in seconds, divide it by 60 and then you have your GPM.
3. Break up your property into hydrozones: You don’t want to over- or underwater your plants. So, it’s vital to plant your turfgrass and landscapes according to their watering needs called hydrozones. Hydrozones include these four variables:
- Area size and shape: Hydrozones can be large or small as well as along the side of the house and the front yard. Hydrozones include the turf strips along your sidewalk and the ground cover in your backyard.
- Sunlight and water: Shady areas of your property don’t need as much water as an area that gets full sun throughout the day.
- Type of plants: Some plants need a lot of water, such as your lawn, and others, including native plants, don’t need a lot of water. Group plants together based on their watering needs.
- Soil type: You can have clay, loam or sandy soils. Clay soils hold their shapes when wet. Loam is the perfect soil and breaks apart when it’s wet, and sandy soil is unable to hold water. Water drains right through it.
Sprinkler System Design Layout
4. Pick your sprinkler heads: Make sure you stick to one sprinkler brand. You don’t want to mix brands because not all sprinkler systems are designed the same.
Additionally, there are different sprinkler heads to meet the watering needs of your various hydrozones:
- Rotors: Choose your rotor head based on the radius and the reach it needs to make. You don’t want to mix rotor sizes and sprays per hydrozone. Instead, you want to keep the same size and spray per zone.
- Fixed sprays: A fixed spray has a radius of 6-18 ft. Fixed sprays deliver water to the same area. One spray should end where the next one starts to evenly water a particular area.
- Spray heads with rotary nozzles: These spray heads deliver consistent water up to 13-30 ft. radius.
- Specialty patterns and bubblers: These sprinklers are designed to solve particular landscape problems, such as a side or lawn end strips. Spray nozzles deliver water to areas that are up to five feet wide and 15 feet long. Bubblers provide water to specific landscape areas, such as trees or shrubs.
Free Lawn Sprinkler System Design Software
- Micro- or drip irrigation: These sprinklers work best on ground covers, landscape beds or other planted areas. Many small emitters deliver water directly to the plant’s roots.
5. Design your sprinkler’s layout: On your design, draw out the spraying circles and sprinkler head locations on your map. Make sure your entire lawn gets watered by adding the areas where nozzles start and stop on your property.
6. Measure and layout piping: Break up the smaller sprinkler heads into clusters of different circuits each controlled by one valve. For larger areas, group valves together with a manifold that you can then attach to an irrigation controller. Then organize the pipes, fittings, sprinkler heads and valves so they work together.
Sketch your irrigation system on your graph paper including the exact distance between the various parts of the sprinkler system, such as valves, controllers, piping and manifolds.
7. Finishing up your plan: In order to make sure you remember everything you need to build your lawn sprinkler, make a list including all sprinkler parts, such as piping, fittings, controllers, valves, sprinkler heads and manifolds.
How K-Rain Helps You with Your DIY Irrigation System Project
At K-Rain, we have all of the parts, spray heads, manuals, valves, controllers and other irrigation system parts to get you started on your DIY project.
Additionally, you can buy your K-Rain supplies at our online store, Lowes and The Home Depot. If a DIY project isn’t your thing, you can find a K-Rain contractor on our website.
If you have any questions about your K-Rain Sprinkler System, you can call our customer service line at 800-735-7246, Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET or email us.
Source:
Walheim, Lance, “Planning Your Lawn Irrigation System.”
Whether you’re a professional landscaper or want to irrigate your own yard, this free Landscape Sprinkler System Design Tutorial is designed to take you step-by-step through the process of creating a professional-quality sprinkler irrigation plan, layout, or drawing.
There are lots of Sprinkler Design Guides, Why This one?
- This tutorial works with ALL sprinkler products and does not base your design on the use of a single manufacturer or store’s products. Most tutorials will force you into using specific products on your plan. Sometimes they are good products, sometimes not. Bonus: This tutorial will teach you how to spot the really bad irrigation products.
- This tutorial assumes you know nothing about irrigation and breaks it all down for you (but the beginner stuff is easily skimmed over for those more experienced.)
- This tutorial is multi-level. Many of the topics start with a outline of the topic, then expand on that outline in detail for those who need more explanation. Finally some subjects then move on to cover special situations or layout that are not “typical” for those who need that additional insight. So while some tutorial pages are long, you may not need to actually read a lot of it. Unless you are a future irrigation professional and interested in learning all about irrigation, which leads us to the next point…
- This guide is complete. It is used by colleges to teach irrigation design courses, and we encourage that use. However, it is written using 6th grade level English, so don’t panic. If you were ever a broke college student you can probably appreciate the idea of a free online textbook! Speaking of free…
- This tutorial is free. Yes there are some ads, along with a few “tips” they pay the cost of keeping it online. The ads on this site are low key. No flashing ads, no pop-ups (except the “we use cookies” pop-up notice that is required by law.)
- If you have a well and/or pump this is one of the only sprinkler system design guides available anywhere (including those $$$ books for sale at stores) that will show you how to correctly design your system so that it will not destroy your pump by making it cycle or run dry.
- Thousands of people have used this tutorial to create their irrigation systems drawings. This tutorial has been online a while, the first version was written back in 1995. You may find an error or two in it (especially in the grammar, it was written by an irrigation expert, not an English major) but most of the technical errors have been found and corrected long ago. Tons of feedback have resulted in rewrites of the parts that were not clear. The advantage of being online is that the tutorial does get constantly updated to incorporate new products, ideas, and methods.
- This tutorial was written by a professional irrigation designer and licensed landscape architect who has over 35 years experience designing irrigation for everything from small tract yards to golf courses. More on the author at the bottom of this page.
Warning: There are lots of online tutorials and this one may not be your choice and that’s fine. However there are a number of design guides around, both online and in stores, that use outdated design methods. Please watch out for these major design errors that may lead to very expensive repairs:
- Beware of measuring flow with a bucket or gauge. The “GPM” value for your new sprinkler system should be based on the size of the existing water supply pipe running to your house. Some do-it-yourself sprinkler system guides have you measure water flow by turning on an existing faucet and timing how long it takes to fill a bucket. Some also suggest using a special gauge that measures the flow. Regardless of how you measure the flow, we now know that just measuring the flow from a faucet results in major errors that can result in your using a irrigation system flow that is way too high for your house’s plumbing to handle. When you turn on a faucet the water from it will often flow out at a rate that is way higher than what is safe for the pipe’s in your house. While running water for a few minutes at this flow to fill a bucket is relatively harmless, running a sprinkler system at that flow on a regular basis is not. This unsafe high flow results in “water hammer” and “scrubbing” damage to the pipes, two very expensive problems that can destroy the pipes in your house. We are talking thousands of dollars to re-pipe your house! The key here is that when determining the water supply volume the pipe size must be a factor considered.
- Sprinklers should have almost 100% overlap. If a sprinkler layout guide shows you coverage arcs that are not going almost all the way from one sprinkler to the next it is based on the old way of doing things back before we had low-flow sprinklers to conserve water. Almost all experts now agree that there should be near 100% overlap of sprinklers. Back in the old days we just told people with dry spots to run the sprinklers longer. That over-watered 90% of the lawn but it greened up the dry spots. We now know it wastes water and even worse, over-watering causes lots of landscape diseases!
All the information you need to create a sprinkler system design for your lawn, shrubs or garden is in this landscape sprinkler design manual. Illustrations, charts and spreadsheets will help explain and simplify the sprinkler irrigation design process. You will learn about lawn sprinklers, shrub sprinklers, and how to select a quality sprinkler head. Automatic and manual valves, controllers/timers, and the basic hydraulics that apply to watering systems are also covered.
Most of the pages of the tutorial are written as stand-alone articles, so that they will be useful to those who do a search for specific information. For this reason there is a small amount of repetitive material throughout the tutorial.
Landscape Sprinkler Irrigation Design Tutorial
Table of Contents
Don’t panic! It looks like a lot to cover, but much of it you will skim over because it applies only to very specific situations that don’t matter for most sprinkler systems. (But if it turns out one of those specific situations applies to YOU won’t you be glad that we included it?) You will find that the tutorial goes quickly once you get started. Just take it step-by-step and it is easy.
- Start Here! Introduction to Irrigation Design: How to use this tutorial, information on software programs to design your sprinkler system, and a few suggestions on those “free designs” offered by the sprinkler manufacturing companies.
- Step #1 Collect Information:
- Measure Your Yard: How to measure your yard easily and accurately for your sprinkler irrigation system.
- Measuring your water supply (critical that it be done right! One size does NOT fit all.):
- City-Slicker Water: How to find the PSI and GPM if you get your water through a pipe from a water-company.
- Country-Bumpkin Water: How to find the PSI and GPM if you pump water from a well, creek, lake, etc..
- Backwoods Water: How to measure the GPM and PSI for other types of water supplies (Moses would use this section).
- Step #2 Select Your Equipment:
- Selecting Your Sprinkler Equipment: Pressure loss is the key to selecting sizes!
- Water Meter: Water meters.
- Backflow Preventer: How to select a backflow preventer. Do you savor the flavor of dog pee? Nope? You want to get this right!
- Mainlines: What type of pipe to use and how to calculate pressure loss in an irrigation system mainline.
- Valves: Types of irrigation valves.
- Elevation Pressure Loss: How to calculate pressure variations in your irrigation system that are caused by elevation changes.
- Sprinkler Heads: How to select the best sprinkler heads for your needs. How to avoid the ones that aren’t so hot.
- Laterals: Type of pipe to use between the valves and sprinkler heads which are called “lateral” pipes.
- Types of Sprinkler Risers: How to connect your sprinklers to the lateral pipes. Get this wrong and your yard will look like Yellowstone with all the geysers shooting water in the air!
- Adjustments: Making pressure loss adjustments to balance the system. Boring but very important if you want the sprinklers to actually spray correctly.
- Selecting Your Sprinkler Equipment: Pressure loss is the key to selecting sizes!
- Step #3Figure Out Sprinkler Head Locations: How to determine the correct sprinkler spacing, and which nozzles to use. Where to place the sprinkler heads. The rules on this have changed since the 70’s when a lot of the guidelines online were written. New low water sprinklers make sprinkler layout much more critical. You get this wrong, you get dry spots!
- Step #4 Create Valve Zones and Draw in Pipes: Identify hydro-zones, create valve zones, draw in the sprinkler pipe routes.
- Step #5 Lateral Pipe Sizes: How to calculate the size for each lateral pipe in the irrigation system. There’s no easy way for this one and lots of bad advice on pipe sizes in Internet help forums and the aisles of your local big box hardware store.
- Finished!Some Tips. Automation, Freeze Protection, Costs, Contractors, and of course a whole tutorial on Do-It-Yourself Installation without winding up in the hospital.
The pages of the sprinkler system design tutorial follow in logical order. To work your way through the entire irrigation design tutorial, simply select “Next Page” when you finish each page. Please take a moment to review the terms and conditions of this website and tutorial- click here for Terms and Conditions.
About the Author:
So I guess if you’re still with me I’ll switch to first person and introduce myself. My name is Jess Stryker. Unless noted, I am the author of what you are reading on this website. I am a California registered Landscape Architect and opened my own irrigation design firm in 1980. I’ve designed thousands of irrigation systems for everything from little squares of grass in a tiny yard to huge shopping centers, regional parks, and golf courses. Much of my work has been for other Landscape Architects who hired me for tricky projects that required a high level of expertise. In my early years I also did a lot of design for agricultural irrigation systems, like pastures, orchards, vineyards, even dust control and cooling sprinklers for poultry. I’m retired now, which means I’m not interested in designing your irrigation system. I’ve designed enough sprinkler systems for a lifetime! This website is a means of passing along what I’ve learned over the years, and keeping a toe in the irrigation water (pun intended.)
The Sprinkler Design Tutorial began in 1995 during a business slow down. I started writing it not really knowing what I would do with it once it was finished. Shortly thereafter the Internet started to catch on. Back then the Internet was mostly educational works (and porn I suppose) and I figured the tutorial would be a good (education not porn!!!) match, so I put it online. It rapidly grew as I added more and more tutorials and articles on other irrigation topics. (I’ve kept porn off it with one notable exception in the early 2000’s when a link was hijacked and I didn’t catch it for a few days.)
I apologize in advance for my warped sense of humor, which you have already encountered and are about to get a lot more of if you continue. Hopefully it breaks the boredom even if it is just to let out a groan. I hope you enjoy this free tutorial and that you learn a lot from it!
This tutorial is only the tip of the iceberg! Use the links on the website home page to find tutorials and articles on just about everything irrigation related. Water filters, pump systems, irrigation scheduling, winterizing, repairs, and much more. Plus there are a few product reviews of some of the most common sprinkler system components.
By using this tutorial you agree to be bound by the conditions and limitations listed on the disclaimer page.