OT: How to disable pop-up sprinklers

If it's just watering concrete, there isn't much chance it'll be needed.

Your choice is to remove it now or remove it later. If you decide to plant something in the concrete, worry about it then.

As I said, next to this concrete is a graveled area that must have been lawn a long time ago. Maybe someone wants lawn there again and then they won't have sprinklers.

But you can't buy them (manufacturer went *poof*) so if you're going to need to replace the entire assembly, which means busting the concrete. Don't plan on fixing it, now, or later.

If you fill it with concrete they won't, either. It'll never be used, without busting the concrete.

if you can remove the stem without digging up the whole device (perhaps there's a retaining ring that unscrews) you could replace it with a plug, or a cap,

a.a. It was not broken, it just needed to be shut off but has no shut-off feature.

a.b. I have no done exactly that. The removed pop-up stem has been labeled and placed in a garage cabinet that will remain with the house even if we move some day, so can be found by a new owner.

I did not need to do this becasue I figured out a way to plug it with a kludge. It actually looks nice, all you see from the outside is a washer and a flat Philips head, sunk into a small hole so nobody can trip.

Do you think, in five years, that the gaskets and all will still be good when/if it's ever needed again. ...that you can even find it? The next guy? it can't be replaced (parts are unavailable) so, once it's disabled, I wouldn't even pretend that it'll ever be used again.

Until it rusts away and starts leaking.

Yes.

...that you can even find it?

I have successfully re-used a 40+ year old inline sprinkler valve from a company liong since extinct.

Stainless and brass won't rust much. One shall not use cheap hardware in such applications.

He's too dumb to realize there's a flow control adjust in the head itself that can be used to shut it off, it's there to equalize flow rates from multiple heads being fed in series on a single pipe.

You're dreaming.

If you hadn't noticed. These things change.

So it'll *never* leak? Kludges aren't the best repair methods.

Unless you are talking about doing them individually you turn them off in blocks at the sprinkler controller.

?-)

RainBird i know about. RainJet brand is new to me. Most popup heads also have an adjustment screw that you can turn down to almost nothing.

Mine are 8-(

Well, not on this one. When you buy a >40 year old house it's surprising how short-lived some of the manufacturers in the US are. Or even products. An example is a top-of-the-line Kohler faucet series. There are no more spare parts. So does it make sense to spend money on name brand top-of-the-line stuff? IMHO ... no, it does not.

Rain Jet was acquired by Toro.. interesting thread here.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Despite all the dissing the RainJet sprinkler I replaced this weekend has faithfully served for over 40 year before it broke. All the others that came with the property when we bought it in the last century still work fine. In my vocabulary that is a high quality product.

Also, it's standard fittings. After digging it out a new pop-up sprinkler spun right on, had the same height and now works fine.

It's individual ones. You can turn them down but not completely off as in zero drops and, right now, in CA every drop counts. Unfortunately large swaths of the population (and some people here ...) fail to understand that which is why the water conservation results to date in CA are paltry at best. Single digit percentage while we have managed

always room for improvement.

also

It really is the same old saw once again, there is more profit in replacement product than repair parts. Reinforcing the throw away thinking that permeates western culture today.

?-)

They made the threads non-standard so new stuff doesn't fit anymore. Meaning you'll eventually have to bust out tiles to fix it and then you'd be looking at the high four digits in "replacement costs".

And then people like me walk and buy from elsewhere -> Profit drops to zero.