On 26/06/20 18:09, Andy Burns wrote:
I have 15 trees planted this year, and rather than spending 2 hours
travelling and 1 hour watering them every day or so, want to set up some
irrigation for them, I had initially thought of soaker hose but probably
some form of dripline would be better.

Does the pipe come with perforations at regular intervals, or do you
have to pierce it where you want? Is there a general standard or do
they all vary per manufacturer. Should you try to adjust it to a
low/constant rate or control it on a timer?

I've never used drip-line where the piping has holes along its length.
So if that's what you are definitely using, stop reading now! But I've
used the other type, where you put drip-heads in, a number of times.

In my experience there were slight differences in the diameter of
Gardena and Hozelock tubing (6 and 6.5mm?), and the drip-heads of one
were a slight looser fit in the pipe of the other. I don't even know if
both are available now, and have no idea if the pipe available from eg
Amazon is any different from either. In any case, for each of the 15
trees I'd use two pieces of narrow pipe off a single length of wider
pipe. That's in case one of the drip-heads gets blocked, so you have a
spare. You get a small tool to make the right size hole in the wider
pipe. I would also tend to use the adjustable heads rather than the
fixed drip one, as IME the latter seemed to get blocked more often.

I would also use a timer. If you don't, and one or more of the tubes
comes loose, you are going to lose rather a lot of water until you fix
the leak! When you set it all up, if you try to do it all with narrow
pipe you will find that adjusting the drip heads will drive you mad, as
the more you open/close each one to get the right rate for that one the
more it affects all the others in the line! That is almost non-existent
using the wide tubing as a feeder for each of the narrow pipes.

--

Jeff