Unclogging Spray Head Nozzles
Okay this is a topic that I know I’ve talked about before and is even one of the 7 tips in my email series, but since I have not blogged about it recently it is worth touching on again. Remember that in a residential lawn irrigation system there are usually two main types of sprinkler heads; rotors and sprays. Sprays are the heads that tend to get clogged nozzles more frequently and need to be unclogged.
Rotor heads rotate and cover a larger area. An average spray distance for a rotor is about thirty feet (30ft). The nozzles come in 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, and 6.0 sizes. The number stands for gallons per minute being delivered out of that sprinkler head’s nozzle. 3.0 is a typical nozzle size, although they are also laid out, placed, and matched accordingly to try and get even precipitation over the lawn and/or landscape. The nozzles on the rotor heads usually do not get clogged up.
Spray heads pop up and stay still, they do not rotate. A spray head’s nozzle is the part that determines the distance and spray pattern that the sprinkler head will put out. Spray nozzles come in varying sizes ranging from four feet (4′) to eighteen feet (18′). The footage measurement stands for the diameter of the throw.
The most common patterns for spray heads are 1/4 circle or 90 degrees, 1/2 circle or 180 degrees, 3/4 circle or 270 degrees and a full circle or 360 degrees. You can get special pattern nozzles or even adjustable nozzles that can adjust from 0 to 360 degrees, but these types of nozzles tend to clog up even more than the fixed pattern spray nozzles.
Just below the spray nozzle, inside the stem of the spray head is a screen. This screen is usually what gets clogged up first. It gets clogged with dirt and debris from your water supply. Well water, especially shallow wells tend to have a lot of debris such as minerals like iron and other sand deposits that will ruin spray heads, spray nozzles, and clog up screens very frequently.
Often you can just wash or replace the screen and the nozzle is good, but sometimes some debris gets past the screen and ends up clogging up the actual nozzle. In this case you can try to remove the debris with a small flat head screwdriver, but normally it is best just to replace the spray nozzle with a new one.
When you’re ready to check for clogged nozzles, get yourself some small mark-out flags ready. Go through your system, one zone at a time, and put a flag by any clogged nozzles. If the head is gunked up pretty bad, you may want to go ahead and flush that head out. To do this you can just remove the nozzle and leave it off, or put a flush cap on and then go turn that zone back on. Water will flow freely through the sprinkler head, flushing out any remaining dirt in the head. You may notice a lot of clogged nozzles if you recently repaired a break and got dirt in the line.
When changing a nozzle or replacing a screen on a spray head, you must hold the riser or stem of the spray head up. If you let it go, it will pop back down because of the tension on the pop-up spring. If you do manage to let it go it can be hard to get your fingers around the stem and pull it back up. It works best to use a nozzle without a screen or use one of those flush-out caps that come with the spray heads to screw on the male threads(female threaded if dealing with TORO sprinkler heads) of the riser and pull it back up.
Cleaning or unclogging your spray head nozzles is a little bit of maintenance that can make a huge difference in the efficiency and performance of your lawn sprinkler or lawn irrigation system. Clogged nozzles will block or distort the spray pattern leaving your lawn with dry spots or ugly patches. You should do this maintenance once at the beginning of Spring, and at least once during the Summer. It will take
Scott
Lawn Sprinklers
