Which is BETTER? - PVC or a Commercial Drip Irrigation System
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- Опубліковано 26 чер 2024
- In this video, Robert explains some of the things he has learned after installing a PVC and commercial drip irrigation system for his square foot garden and perimeter plants.
Robert also answers some of the questions subscribers asked from the previous drip irrigation video.
Below you can find links to the full length how-to videos Robert created for the PVC and commercial drip irrigation videos:
-PVC Drip Irrigation System Video: • PVC Drip Irrigation Sy...
-Commercial Drip Irrigation System Video: • DIY Drip Irrigation Sy...
Video Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:25 Cost
0:58 Drip Holes
2:06 Special Tools
3:39 Installation
4:12 Sun Light Exposure
4:50 Plastic Safety
5:14 Tear Down
5:31 Cosmetics
5:47 Square Foot Gardening
6:21 Q & As
8:12 Conclusion
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Thank you for your hard work. I decided to go with the schedule 20 PVC pipe method for my six 11ftx4ft beds
Super detailed and practical video -- very helpful in making our decision on PVC vs commercial
SO GLAD I found your videos!!
man, you are awesome. you are definitely on the top of my list for gardening videos
Just found your channel!!! You are amazing. Your explanation of your installs is excellent.
I use "irrigation" water on my garden. This is water that is delivered via open ditches miles away. As a result, all manner of "gunk" (seeds, weeds, sludge, bugs, etc.) gets into my watering system. I found that the drip emitters were CONSTANTLY plugging up. I went to 3/4" pvc pipe (but used a slightly larger drill for the holes), then put male quick-connectors on the pipes and a female quick-connector on the hose. LOVE IT!!!
My most recent attempt at watering the garden was to use the poly tubing and drill the 16th inch holes in it. So far it has been working great.
Great video! Please keep them coming. I have learned a lot from you, they have also helped convince my wife to let me install a pump system with a drip irrigation from our rain barrels. Thank you
Thanks for the feedback, and glad to be able to help! Feel free to share other ideas or questions you have as the goal of this channel is help others as I'm learning, but also build a community of like minded people so we can share advice and support each other's projects.
Unroll your tubing so the sun can soften it. It helped me
Thanks for the well-done comparison. I've been using drip irrigation in the California desert since the early 80s. The best ever was called Netafim which I believe was originally developed in Israel. I had the 1/2 " brown pipe with the emitters pre-installed. That stuff lasted a good 20+ years. I used it in a couple of different veggie garden setups, all of the components were quality and it was pretty easy to reassemble and change around. When I tried to replace it I could not find the same thing. I did find some called Netafim but the hoses were smaller and over a fairly short period of time some of the emitters failed. Definitely not the same or as easy to work with. The early style Netafim really worked the best here.
I have used the black poly and various types of emitters outside of my veggie garden for ornamentals, etc. Here that does not work too well unless the area is fenced so that the critters can not get to the tubing. Young coyotes and even rabbits love to chew on poly tubing. We leave water out for them so it is not that they are necessarily seeking water. The coyotes seem to find tearing out poly tubing great fun so it means constant monitoring and repairs. Also with very hard water, many of the emitters tend to plug up even the ones that claim to be self-cleaning. In the last two years, I have reduced the number of ornamental plants preferring to use the water for the veggie garden so I have less maintenance for the poly than previously.
This year I decided to redo the irrigation for the veggie garden and looked at many different options. I did check out the garden grids that you mention in this video but dang they are very expensive. Looks like a great system but is fairly cost-prohibitive for even a small garden. After much research wound up finding your pvc pipe video. Even as a woman in her late 70s I was able to put the system together for my four raised beds. Thank you for the clear instructions. Your comparison in this video was well done and I agree with some of the benefits of both. I note in the comments that there was criticism of the appearance of the PVC pipe system. It may not be beautiful but my veggie garden is tucked away in a very small backyard area that is not in plain view and even if it was in a more prominent spot I don't think it would matter to me. Despite the drought here I had a very successful garden year. A benefit to this system vs when I had the drip system on a timer: I am out there in the garden while the water is running and I am paying closer attention to the plants. The water doesn't have to run as long as the drip and during that short period of time, I am on the spot checking for pests and any problems. When the timer was automatically coming on in the morning I think I tended to be a bit lazier and less attentive. Every garden and every gardener is different and we each have to find what works best in our locale and lifestyle. I am enjoying your experiments.
I used to do irrigation and we had poly line with built in drip holes already in it. More than just holes, its actually a little immeter to help regulate water flow, pressure, etc.
For your square foot garden where you thought pvc with holes drilled might be better, this will achieve the same thing really fast and easy. Usually running on the ground or burred just under mulch or something.
I think that is what you were looking at in your last image, just looked different than the product I used.
BTW a big roll of the tubing will be WAY cheaper than that grid and while you can DIY a grid, just running one long piece and zig zagging it around also works perfectly fine!
That one product I think is for a consumer who doesn't know much and wants a ready made solution.
Love the video! I've gotten cheap (like $1) returned drip hoses from a reseller and I didn't put them in this year, and now I know I should have.
I needed to move all my planter beds anyway, so I guess it's just time for me to build an all-new, unified system.
Awesome, that's a good deal! Yeah, so far I have no complaints. I will probably provide an update in a year or so.
Thanks so much for this comparison!
You are welcome Sabrina! Are you currently using any type of drip irrigation?
@@GreenTechTown I am using an emitter line now. I started off with drip tape, then soaker hose and finally drip line. I had considered pvc for many years though and so it's great to hear what you think now.
I am still evolving my system as I add more and more garden every year and we've been doing this 4 years now. I do not like the drip tape, it got clogged and was fussy to deal with. The soaker hose worked well, but it falls apart or splits really fast, even when buried. I'm using a half inch "total CV line" made by Jain and burying it and it's been great! For my grow bags though, I'm thinking a combo of quarter inch soaker hose and emitter line. I made a spiral with the line about an inch down inside the bag. I discovered the soaker hose emits water much more quickly than the drip line and so it's great for my artichokes, but I'll use the drip for my peppers.
I really enjoy my drip system. The ability to cover my irregular ground surface is very helpful.
Awesome. How long have you had yours installed, and anything you don’t like about it so far?
@@GreenTechTown I have used it for roughly a little over a month since I totally finished it. I like the ability to cover the irregular ground. But the push connection pieces that I used causes me a great degree of difficulty to disconnect them if I have to reposition the layout.
Yes, hot water is a big help for fittings. I use an old insulated cup, it even has a hole just the right size that I can close when not in use.
Thanks for the comparison video.
Thanks Alchemix Bar for watching! Have you used either method, or do you do something entirely different?
@@GreenTechTown We are building a raised bed in a couple weeks. I am watching videos on which way to water it. So this helped .
Instead of putting the hot water in a cup, try putting it in a vacuum flask and keeping the lid on between uses.
Good idea MRAB! Thanks for sharing!
Related, I'm thinking about looking into a Heat Gun, so that if I need to disassemble my system in the fall I can. It's hard to dunk the fitted pieces into hot water ...
If anyone has any advice on this, I'm curious.
I would recommend reaching out to DripDepot.com since they usually respond same day or the next day (I'm not sponsored by them lol, they just really have good customer service). I tried this concept off camera, and it seem to work, however, I'm not sure if it causes any other issues down the road. It's hard for me to see a professional installer for a large job using hot water as a means to connect/disconnect everything though.
Thanks!
You Welcome, and thanks Gil for the support!
The commercial drip system had 2 major disadvantage: gophers and time.
As to the gopher problem, on average for every 40' of line I had installed gophers chewed through the piping. That may not seem like a big deal, since the line is easy to repair or replace, however it always seems to happen at the worst time (either when I'm too ill to check on the garden, or when I am on vacation), causing the entire system to go down and killing off a large part of my garden.
The problem with time is that, every spring I have had to replace ALL of the irrigation heads, as they clog up every winter. That gets expensive and exhausting when trying to set up my spring garden.
Very helpful video. I have been using soaker hoses on my raised beds for several years but the hoses often start leaking after less than a season of use -- regardless of brand and the use of flow restrictors. I wasn't sure what to do instead but this really helped me decide (I'll go with commercial).
Awesome, glad to hear it helped!
Very helpful video, thank you! I’m about to install a commercial drip irrigation system for my perennial garden.
Awesome. Good luck with the install. What made you decide to install a drip system?
@@GreenTechTown We had to redo 80% of our plantings, half of them are down a steep slope to the sidewalk. It takes us about 2 hours to hand water all the newly installed plants, we’ve had 90° plus temps for weeks and our part of the state is now officially in a severe drought. So to conserve water but keep our plants alive we decided DIY drip irrigation was the best and most economical solution. In 2010 we installed drip irrigation ourselves and purchased everything at Drip Depot. It worked well but due to demolition of our yard (an even longer story) we now have to do it all over again. I’m enjoying your channel, thanks for your interest and more thanks for your helpful and informative videos!
@@viv2199 Drought in 2021 (Virginia) is the reason I decided to do automated irrigation. (and concern it was only going to get worse)
But then 2022 was the wettest year we've had in a while. Figures!
@@isaacwitmer5139
Hi Isaac,
Hopefully you and your home/garden/landscape are doing well despite the downpours.
Droughts will return and you’ll be ready for them, having installed the drip irrigation system. Best of luck!
Thanks for the comparison between the two systems. I was curious which would be better. Using the hot water is a no brainer, thanks much for the tip. Just wish I knew about it before. In my towers I use a combination because it's an overhead system. I use the PVC for stability and run the drip irrigations tubing thru it. When I come to each tower, I cut out a small hole and drop down the smaller tubing with an adjustable valve for water flow. I run it out of a 32gal. trash can with water and nutrients.
Nice! Thanks for sharing your setup concept. Using PVC for stability makes sense as well.
HOW are you this smart. I’m amazed.
Great vid... I am currently at the point where I am looking at methods of irrigation for my automated greenhouse, and have deemed I will need a manual hose in combination with my automatic feeding. Because the greenhouse is a "hoop house," I will be using poly tube as the main source, with mist heads irrigating the soil and spraying overhead. I also plan to build in a PVC hose bib to have a stable fixture to attach hose accessories to based upon need with manifold to control which direction my pump will be running )irrigation or hose). This vid has given me some ideas as to which direction to go.
Awesome project Neal! Also, did you build your greenhouse from a kit, or was it a custom build?
@@GreenTechTown I bought an inexpensive kit from Amazon because the main curiosity was the ability to create the Arduino portion of monitoring temps and moisture to trigger sprinklers, fans, heaters, and lights. I'm not excellent with plants, but always wanted a garden, so I am leveraging my automation skills to make it happen.
Appreciate guys like you providing strong well thought out and accurate content.
Excellent! Thanks for the feedback. I did "commercial" (Poly) because I was more comfortable cutting and resizing with a scissors than buying all the equipment for PVC.
My problem is that I didn't do drip, I did soaker hoses. I did this because it offered me more flexibility with where my water was going to come out, though I realize it's not *quite* as water efficient as drip. I may tweak this in the coming years as I figure out what spacing I want for water. Soaker hoses are also easier to bury, where as it feels like a drip system you want to drop the water on top.
The biggest problem with soaker hoses + 1/4" tubing is that the soaker hoses are all built for hoses, so at each tubing -> soaker hose I have to add two fittings, one to turn it into 3/4" and then one to attach the 3/4" for the soaker hose. I haven't found any good fittings yet for the polyethylene tubing that fit directly onto soaker hoses.
The other issue I've found is that not all Poly fittings are equal. Some with barbs will not come off, and if I want to resize, I have to cut them apart. I like the ones with a little bump and a screw valve. These are the ones you use primarily in your video, and I will be buying only those in the future in case I want to take my system apart or resize some things. The elbow barbs stick so tight they don't disassemble.
Thanks for sharing Isaac! Always great to hear other people's experience. So far I've purchased all my fittings & tubing from one source, but I was curious about rather or not all poly fittings were made equally. Also, yes, the perma-loc fittings have been awesome.
I also seen where others were having issues with barb fittings for 1/2" poly tubing if they removed the fitting from the tubing and tried to re-insert. The fitting would just pop off once the water was turned on. They ended up adding hose clamps to help prevent that issue, but highly recommended using perma-loc fittings if you could get your hands on them.
I have had that same issue with fittings that bite. There probably is a tool to remove the pressure to back it out without having ti cut it but I don’t know about it. I know with actual “Sharkbite” plumbing connectors there is a tools for doing exactly that. Thanks again!!
My soaker hoses clogged up in about 1 season, shortest life span of any of my irrigation bits.
I used PVC in many different applications. My oldest one is a hoop pasture for small animals. PVC and horse fencing. For small animals like chickens I put the tough plastic black construction fencing. (smaller holes than horse panels) It is now 20 years old and I still use it for "free ranging" my chickens. It has held a goat, a sheep, a mini horse at various times. For the chickens I use it with flight net on top as we have flying predators. Our ground is hard so diggers haven't been a problem and I move them to a concrete slab at night if I need too. I had 2 of them but a not so smart person decided it was easier to turn it up on the PVC and roll it. The PVC broke. That was at the 10 year mark. It couldn't handle the weight on one side bearing down after it had been in a circle for so many years. As long as 2 of us pick it up at each side the remaining one is very sturdy and not heavy to move.
I suggest using a Thermos to keep the hot water in and close it after each dip to keep it hot
Thanks for 5he info, I have a 2 rain barrel setup. But I don’t use it fully. I have plants 75 feet away that I want to water using the rain setup, thanks
Great video bud, looks very well put together. I've been gardening since I was a kid and I think the mist spray that comes off underground PVC is the beat. Because it really soaks the ground and it's light on the plants. I put it in the center of my beds. You put them all on sprinkler timers and it does all that watering for you. I normally water heavy in the mornings in the hot NC sun. But if I see some wilting during the day, I'll turn the system on for 5 mins mid day during June, July and even Aug.
Good luck bud, looks great.
I also see you're using rain water, which is great and better for the plants tbh. But I'd do both (rain and city water) so you have plenty of water. But it also depends on how much you're growing.
Thanks for sharing the useful information. I too currently use both water sources. I'll soon be upgrade my rain collection capacity so I can use less city water. Also the mist spray that is located underground, is it watering the plants from underneath the soil, and if so, what is this type of system called as I'd like to look into it when I have time?
@@GreenTechTown lol no it's a pop up. Like a regular sprinkler head. But the smaller ones. Where you can change out the heads. I use the adjustable ones so you can use the 90°, 180°, 360°, or pretty much whatever you like. It's made by Rain Bird. It's just an adjustable piece on top. You can turn the screw to chance the spray, then spin the plastic piece from full open, to closed. So anything in between you can change the direction of the spray. Makes things a lot easier. Sorry if I didn't explain it well lol, you're way better at that then I am. Haha
They do have small mist sprayers with the flex line that you have, but im not crazy about them. I really like your Rain Barrel set up, we're not allowed to collect rain water here in NC, crazy right? It's nature... but some just do it, and I can't blame them. You have the right idea and have a great set up. I just watched you change out your pump, what a difference.
Trying to figure out a solution for my fruit fly net enclosure. Made it from pvc and cut using a metal saw….should have watched this to see there’s a special pipe cutter!! Also great tip Re: hot water - been using brute strength like a tool 😅. Keep up the quality content!
Haha, glad to hear you found something useful in the video!
For hot water, I recommend a thermos flask.
Love your videos. Next time, use an extention cord and an electric kettle. Hot water, no walking, long cool down. 😎
I’ve used 3/4” pvc tubing to support bird netting for years and it hasn’t degraded at all. It stays outside year round.
Thanks for sharing Jan. Yeah I’ve used those PVC hoops on top of my raised beds for about 3 years now and haven’t seen any major issues.
I used a lighter to connect my tubing to any fittings, it stretched out and when it cools it shrinks back down, REALLY snug
Did you try the 6” or 12” drip line with the commercial drip system yet? May work with your 12’ grid system, just a thought. Good video comparing the two.
What kind of prep for the commercial drip line for winter? That is my concern in Atlantic Canada… how to make it last season to season. Do I have to take it apart each winter? Disconnect and blow it out? Curious what others think.
I purchased all my commercial drip components from Drip Depot and this is what they recommended regarding winterizing your system:
Winterizing a drip irrigation system is easy. Timers and head assembly components (backflow preventers, filters, pressure regulators) need to be removed and stored indoors. Most drip irrigation parts are made of extremely durable plastic which can withstand freezing temperatures as long as the water is removed from the system. Drip irrigation experts commonly install a threaded end cap at a low point in the system which allows the water to be drained out of the system easily. Once the water is drained out, then simply screw the cap back on and it's ready for the winter. Please refer to the following Winterizing Blog link for further details: help.dripdepot.com/support/solutions/articles/11000044363-winterizing
Hope that helps some.
Could you use the 1/2 " black irrigation tubing but drill 1/16" holes like you did with the pvc tubing and get the best of both systems? Less expensive piping and longer lived and more UV resistent tubing?
I do not see why not. I actually just watched a video online where someone did something like that for a square-foot garden.
Good video man keep it up. I dont like the way the pvc look myself
Thanks Bearded bushcraft!
Could you use a heat gun instead of the hot water? Seems it might work faster. And would only take a minute or less per fitting
I'm not sure but I would think you can, you would just need to make sure you do not leave the heat gun pointed at the tube too long.
Can both of these drip irrigation methods be used on let’s say, 5 acres worth of blueberries? Is there an amount of linear feet where the effectiveness wears thin due to distance? Just trying to figure out what I should do for crop rows of blueberry bushes. Thanks for your video, lots of great information
Good question. I do not know myself since I've never look into that, but I would assume at some point it would come down to the motor power, size of the tubing, land elevation, and friction lost just to name a few variables. I'm not sponsored by anyone, but I would recommend reaching out to DripDepot and let them know your situation and see what they might recommend. You could always buy directly from them or somewhere else after they give you a better idea of what components you may need.
Try to heat drip irrigation tube with hair dryer
Good tip!
Can this system be used for fruit trees that require lots of water?
Definitely, you just need to pick an emitter/dripper that is best suited for that application.
And does the black pipe heater that water up alot and would that effect the plants
I haven't noticed any issues so far. If anything, the plants appear to be thriving more since everything is almost automated.
@@GreenTechTown thanks probably the way im going after i build my chicken house
I think it does heat it up a bit, but remember it only heats up the water in the pipe. as soon as you turn your pump on, cool water flows through the pipe.
I'm going to try to cover my poly tubing with mulch next year though, to minimize this.
@@isaacwitmer5139 might make it last longer to keep it out of the sun
I agree, covering it with mulch is a great idea to make it last longer, and keep the sitting water cooler.
Use a lighter to heat the line
@GreenTechTown… “…are designed for PACIFIC flow rates” ….WHAT???
You mean SPECIFIC, not “pacific”. Check this out…
“Specific” is defined as:
adjective
1. clearly defined or identified.
"increasing the electricity supply only until it met specific development needs"
2. BIOLOGY
relating to or connected with species or a species.
"the differences between them can only be on the specific level"
Pacific is defined as:
1.
peaceful in character or intent.
"a pacific gesture"
Similar:
peace-loving
peaceable
2. relating to the Pacific Ocean.
"the Pacific War"
**The more you know, the more you grow.**
PVC is toxic, I think.
Hungry for plastic ? 😱😡
Thanks!
You welcome!