1st time on and all zones running at the same time?

[Spilly]

Bought my home in the middle of the winter. (Everything covered with snow) Just turned the water on to the sprinkler system for the first time today. Acts like all zones of the sprinkler system are on at the same time. 6 Zones as far as I've found. Water coming out of all sprinkler heads at a very low rate. Hard to believe that all valves are sticking. I have unplugged the sprinkler controller so no valves can possibly have any power on them. Is there a chance that low pressure from a bad leak or bad adjusted pressure regulator could cause this? The system was turned off last year but I can't be certain that the previous owners really winterized the system like I would have.

[jimbo]

The problem almost has to be related to each valve individually. It does appear they are all stuck open. I would take the valves apart one at a time, replace the diaphragm assembly, or at least blow it out. I think you will just need to repair each valve, one by one.

[Spilly]

Yeah it doesn't make much sense to me but the house is only 1.5 years old and the sprinkler system and lawn was put in 1 year ago. I've had valves stick before but usually only after you turn a zone on and it doesn't shut off. I'll tackle them one at a time. Thanks

[Spilly]

Wanted to end my post by sharing my solution. The valves that I have are Hunter valves. I looked on the internet and found out information on these valves. I found that these valves have bleeder adjustment screws and the last owner had opened them all up probably as a winterizing step. So it was a simple solution but I have never had valves with that feature in the past.

Spilly

[Gary Swart]

Rainbird valves have a similar bleeder. This allows you to turn each valve on manually from the control box. Good feature if you need to turn a zone on to check out the sprinklers, etc.. Also very useful for blowing the water out in the fall. If you leave all of them open, then all of the zones will operate, or try to operate, at once. It would be rare to have them all really run at full capacity since you likely don't have enough water supply to that, but you'd get some water out of everything. When I blow the water out in the fall, I close each bleeder when I finish that zone because I use my own compressor. If a lawn service blows the lines, they use an industrial sized compressor, and they can blow the entire system at once so they might leave the bleeders open.