Moving Sprinkler Heads for Dummies

Nope, no swing pipe here, Dave...

If you wanted to troubleshoot a 1967 Camaro, you might head to Google to look for help. If you ran across a website that went on and on about the EFI and the exhaust gas recirculation valve, you'd recognize it immediately as utter bull. Why? because no '67 Camaro had fuel injection, electronic or otherwise; and no vehicle in the '60s needed emissions control, including the EGR valve. The same thing happened many times across the website called eHow, where J-school and English lit graduates scraped information from the web without understanding it and pretended to help people in need. Take, for instance, "technology sector" guy David Miller, found here explaining "How to Move Inground Sprinkler Heads" for eHow.com... or perhaps not.

You wonder why anyone would even think of such a thing, but Miller's explanation was succinct:

"...as your yard matures and changes, trees or other objects can block the spray from your sprinkler heads..."

...which, frankly, is bushwa. Most times people want to move a sprinkler head is because they've changed the layout by adding a deck or patio, or perhaps a fence. Of course, those among us who've owned homes with in-ground sprinkler systems know that there's a network of underground PVC pipes and each sprinkler head rises from a tee in the pipe... but that seems to exclude Dave. He thinks that the sprinklers are mounted on something called a "swing pipe."

That's because Miller, who's probably never done a lick of work on an in-ground sprinkler system, found a reference to RainBird's DIY sprinkler systems that use "funny pipe," a flexible black poly pipe. Of course, since Dave hadn't actually seen any of the piping in an underground system, he wasn't aware that his "solution" was actually intended for people who were installing their systems and wanted to relocate sprinkler heads before locking everything down.
In other words, Miller blew it – he wrote volumes of useless text about a topic for which he had no background. Rubbish... Oh, and as proof that Miller knew not what he was writing about? Check out this "warning":

"Irrigation systems are broken up into areas, or zones, to come on at the same time (such as front lawn or back lawn). Be sure the head you are relocating stays in the same zone, or it will be running while all the others are off, making your system less efficient."

In all honesty, we have no idea what that means. That's just par for the course for a Dumbass of the Day, come to think of it.

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