Transcript for:
Guide to Installing a Sprinkler System

[Music] foreign [Music] we're going to see how easy it is to install an evergreen digital sprinkler today before we get started make sure you have the right requirements so 40 to 80 psi on the water pressure you have about eight gallons per minute on Flow and we'll show you how to measure that and you also have clean water before you start digging anywhere make sure you call 811 so that they can Mark any utilities or electrical lines so you don't hit them when you're digging all right let's get started all right so let's unbox this Evergreen digital sprinkler system so over here we have the controller that's going to connect to your internet through Wi-Fi and it also has the power plug on it then it also has the controller cable that'll plug into the digital sprinklers over here we have the digital sprinkler head you'll have as many of these as your as your home needs on top of that we have the sprinkler cable and the flex hose now what you'll need to purchase on your own is any PVC pipe any elbows or connectors and also one inch tees with female pipe threads and that'll allow us to connect to these flex pipes you also need some PVC glue a PVC cutter and some Teflon tape let's get started so the next step on this system is to measure how much pressure you have and make sure it's between 40 and 80 psi so I can just take any pressure gauge and hook it up to your hose bib where your garden hose plugs in turn on the spigot and you can see that we have over 40 PSI pressure here so we can put it in an air green system now if you have less than 60 PSI pressure it may not spray completely to 30 feet you might be limited to about 25 feet so this is an important step before you place your heads so the next thing to check is to make sure that we have enough flow and a really easy way to do that is to take just a regular five gallon bucket and a stopwatch and if we can fill this bucket in less than 45 seconds then we know that we have at least eight gallons per minute all right all right and that's only about 20 seconds so we got plenty of flow for this particular house so the next step is to place the locations you want your Aero green sprinkler heads and before you do any digging you want to make sure that they can spray to the farthest corners of that zone you can do this from the locations that you put when you use the ear green quote tool or you can just put a flag in and get a tape measure and then measure out as long as I have 60 PSI or more I know I can throw 30 feet so I'll put this down and measure all the way out to the edge of the zone and I'm at 28 feet so this one will work just great so now you want to determine your location for your ear green controller you're going to want a place that has an outdoor outlet so you can power the box and also a place that has at least four bars of Wi-Fi coverage so that we can connect it to the internet this is where we're going to Route the cable that's going to go out to all your digital sprinklers so once you find a place and you've mapped it out we'll install the Box later but this will tell us where we've got to bring the wire for to control the sprinkler heads so the next step is to find the place that you want to tap into your water line to get water to all the Evergreen digital sprinklers so a couple places you can do that is any spigot or hose spigot that you have near where your irrigation shut off is or at any irrigation valve box if you have existing valves you have main water line there and then you can have more than one point of connection if that makes putting in your system easier in this particular case we chose a hose spigot and you can see where we just tapped in with our own PVC to the mainline version of that and then we've trenched all the way down and this is going to go to each of the era green sprinklers all the way down the yard so instead of having pipes all around the outside with a traditional irrigation system you just have one pipe which means about 80 percent less pipe and 80 percent less digging we've also put in a little shut off valve here to make it really easy to shut off the water if we ever have to do maintenance so for the trenching you're going to put the ear green sprinkler cable and controller Cable in the same trench that you put the PVC pipe for the PVC pipe make sure you use one inch PVC pipe or grater so that you can get adequate flow to the digital heads and put your trench about two feet away from where you'd like your sprinkler head placement that allows you to put one of these T connectors and we'll be connecting that into the one inch connection on the flex hose so now we're going to put on the flex hose to our pipe so it's important to have Teflon tape on the big side but we're not going to use any Teflon tape on the sprinkler side so get good wraps of Teflon tape and then we're going to screw this into the fitting off of our main line if you look there we also put an extra Shed off valve as kind of an extra that's a optional amount but it makes it very easy to do maintenance we can turn off one individual sprinkler head so we're going to screw this in and then we're going to put a wrench on it to make it basically wrench tight okay so the next part after after we've done that is to go ahead and we'll go ahead and flush the line this is very important to get any PVC glue out of the line before we connect in the digital sprinkler system we don't want to have any rocks or any little pieces out there on that side so generally let this run about three minutes and that makes sure that we get any debris or anything else on the line before we connect the digital sprinkler head The Next Step we're going to do is install the ear green digital sprinkler on the flex pipe and for this we do not use any Teflon tape and we just do it hand tight no tools so we're going to screw the sprinkler onto the flex pipe and taking care just not to cross thread it and you want to do it pretty firmly hand tight to compress that gasket but you don't have to overuse it and never use any tools so once the sprinkler is connected we're going to turn the water on and check for any leaks and we look good optionally you can take like a six inch valve box and put that next to over your optional turn off at the sprinkler head and this is a nice place to put all your connections into and to roll up any additional extra cable that you have and it just makes it easier if you ever have to replace a sprinkler now we're going to hook up the electrical wire to the sprinkler so that we can communicate with the sprinkler head so the first thing we do is on the sprinkler cable you notice there's these clips which we're going to use you can just take any key or a screwdriver and take out the clips and set them aside for right now there's one on each side then we want to take the cable that comes from the controller and it should be the larger the connector and should have a black cap on it you can remove that black cap and on the sprinkler cable you'll see a red cap that says this e this end towards the controller so we'll take that red end off and we'll plug them in they're male and female and line up the arrows and push them together and once they're pushed together you can take the Caps one end will slide on this side and then the other end slides on the other side and that makes sure that no water gets into that connection and also that's strain relief so it can't be pulled apart now for the next connector this will let you daisy chain all the other uh sprinkler heads so go to the sprinkler cable that's going to go to the next sprinkler head down the line away from the controller plug that one in and put the caps on in the same way and all done so to install the controller take the back bracket off the back of the controller and you can put the controller down now put it up against the wall the fold is going to be at the very top and you're going to put the screw not in the top holes but the bottom holes and make sure you get a level so that you understand whether the top is level or not and then simply screw in at the bottom of the holes once the bracket's installed to put the controller on the bracket just take the two screws that are on top put them into the holes and Slide the controller down once it's slid down there are two screw holes on the bottom to secure with two further screws after you've mounted your controller plug in the AC adapter into an outdoor outlet box and take the controller cable and plug it either into the first sprinkler if your first sprinkler is less than 50 feet away or you might need a sprinkler extension cable under sprinkler cable plug that in and then put the clips on top now let's set up the app so go to the App Store and download the erogreen 2 app okay and then push the add controller button make sure to let it use your camera and your location for the app to function properly Now scan the barcode on the side of the controller with your phone on a first time setup the app will prompt you to put in the Wi-Fi credentials for your Wi-Fi network you'll enter those in and then the app will connect to the ear green controller so the next step is to check your sprinkler wiring so make sure all your sprinklers are connected to the era green plug and play cable after you do that open the app and press the more key and then press the test sprinkler wiring key press test all connections and the system will perform a self-check to make sure that it has an electrical connection to each of your sprinklers All Greens perfect so once you've checked to see that all your sprinklers are electrically connected through the app and you have all the water and there's no leaks you can bury your trenches and bury your sprinkler heads when you bury the sprinkler heads make sure that the heads themselves are a quarter inch above the level of the dirt not the level of the grass but the level of the soil and that'll make sure that they are far enough down that they don't get hit by lawn mowers but they're also high enough up that a lot of dirt and debris doesn't get inside the sprinkler head also in this case you can see the valve box and we'll put that valve box below the surface level so that grass will grow on top of it that's only in the case of an emergency where we need to replace a head if your sprinkler head is on a slope you want to you want to sort of split the difference between having the sprinkler head be parallel to the ground and perpendicular so it'll be about half the angle of the slope that you'll Mount the sprinkler head at so now we're going to calibrate our eargreen digital sprinkler heads so to start out with we're going to come onto the phone now we go in and we pick the Zone in this case zone six that we want to calibrate click on this and there's a recalibrate or a calibrate button at the top we press that and it says sprinkler calibration I need a tape measure 25 feet of relatively flat ground so now if you notice I've laid out a mesh measuring tape along that 25 foot section there what's going to happen now when I hit continue is the sprinkler head is going to go ahead and pop up and I can rotate it now I'm going to take four measurements that will calibrate the sprinkler so right now it's asking me how far is your sprinkler currently spraying and it looks like it's spraying about eight feet four inches so I put in eight feet and four inches and push next and then it sprays out to a new distance and it says how far is your sprinkler spraying now and that's all you have to do okay so now that we have our sprinkler heads in it's time to program the watering shape so that each sprinkler can follow the individual Contours of your Landscaping remember Evergreen sprinkler heads don't overlap you're going to just have them water each individual area this head right here we can go ahead and take and select digital zone six and then select set watering shape and the way this works there's a set of instructions that comes up on your screen but you basically put an individual watering points and it will draw straight lines between them so it's like creating this dot to dot video game that will show it exactly where to put water so right now we don't have any points on our screen so what I can do is I can go at a point and I can decide where I want this sprinkler head to pop up because this will be my first point so I'll kind of drag it over here and I can when I drag it with my finger you can see the water goes right to where I spray it now I also have these controls that will allow me to do fine controls and if I push the bottom button here I can bring it in until it's about six inches from the edge of the lawn and that's just perfect then I push add point and it's going to add another point out to the side I'll drag it with my finger and it'll move to the new point and again I can adjust that one with my finger or with the fine controls to put it so it's just hitting about six inches up that's a little too far about six inches from the edge of the lawn like that and I continue to do this until I have all the points and I've and I've basically drawn the shape of my Landscaping so this point needs to go a little bit further anytime I want to I can hit the re-center button and that helps me see my map a little bit better and I'll keep putting these points in up that one's perfect I'll put another one in up over here and that one needs to go a little bit further up but not that far and I'll do one right up here in the corner so I can move the point over and bring it out all right so I'll add another point and continue to draw the shape and again I only have to throw it about six inches in front of where the line is the water will seep out to the edges now for a sprinkler head like this that's on the corner I'll want to put a zero point right at the sprinkler head so that the head will go and pop down on the corner and it won't water this patio area so that's how you set up and program an ear green system so now that we've set up the watering shapes for each of our digital sprinklers we can schedule them and decide how often we'll water so if I open this up for our first schedule I can give that schedule a name maybe I'll call it lawn and a start time 6 a.m and I'm going to have this instead of even odd days I'll have it water on individual days so I'll set it up for Monday Wednesday and then I'll have it go on Friday as well and it will be watered by Auto water what that means is that the internet weather will come down and describe exactly how much water that zone should get and I'll turn on all of the digital sprinklers themselves so that each of those zones gets watered and hit save that's it we now have our Monday Wednesday Friday schedule and it'll take about 53 minutes to water this yard given the weather that's happening right now assistant [Music]