Most people look at the task of building a lawn irrigation system with dread. The dread that they feel can often lead them to calling in the professionals for a job they could well do themselves. Installing a lawn irrigation system is quite a bit of serious work; but it's straightforward enough that anyone handy about the house could complete the job themselves and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. Let us look at how it is done with a drip lawn irrigation system.
A drip irrigation system is great in an area where drought conditions exist, where the local authorities don't allow regular watering. With a timer regulating the way drip irrigation occurs, you can easily make a little water go very far. Let's look at how you would install a drip irrigation system above ground.
It's easy to set up a makeshift above ground drip irrigation system with nothing more than flexible garden hose and a few pressure regulators. It shouldn't take more than a couple of hours to cut a few holes in a length of garden pipe, and connect it to a pressure regulator. It's easy to buy ready-made rigid piping with holes cut at at equal distances too. That could actually make for a better design.
With an underground irrigation system, you certainly do have a lot more work going in, but you're rewarded with more aesthetically pleasing results. There's nothing above ground to see except a beautiful green lawn. There is a certain amount of additional efficiency to using an underground drip irrigation system. When you place piping within the ground, you bring water directly to the roots of the plants, and there is no water at all lost to evaporation. It makes for the best kind of use of your water. No one will oversee you watering your lawn, they'll just to see how beautiful the results are. You do have to put in a little extra work in the beginning to bury all the pipes though.
So why would anyone ever choose anything but underground? To begin with, some people just like to change the layout of their garden all the time. They like to keep putting in new plants and taking out the old. With an underground system in place, you do lose a little bit of this kind of flexibility. Still, in an age where the watering of our lawns is closely supervised by the authorities, an underground system might let you do more with less.
