Finding where our leak is.

We have an older system with 3 zones. All zones were working fine up to about 3 weeks ago. All of a sudden, one of the zones doesn't have enough pressure to make the sprinklers pop up although water does pour out of the sprinklers at their sites.

We assume there has been a break somewhere in the zone, but don't have a clue how to begin to locate it. The zone covers quite a distance through multiple areas of our lawn so we'd like to avoid digging up our lawn any more than necessary. Any ideas how we go about this?

Thanks for any help you can give.

Lindy

This is not facetious: look for the wet spot. If you let the water run, it will show up somewhere. When you say water "pours" out of the heads, that can be an issue on certain types of pop-ups, especially the old Champion brass bodies. But it can also be an indicator of a broken riser.

Time to put on the Dick Tracy hat and start poking around.

Thanks Jimbo for the quick reply. We actually did that and did not notice any obvious locations, except one place where the dirt under a walking stone was wetter than elsewhere. That is where we are going to start, but since we bought the house post-sprinkler install, we have no idea where the lines are located. Maybe this will be a good time to try to find out.

One more question. Does anyone know of any affordable devices that will locate pvc from above ground like there are ones to locate metal pipe?

No. This is why buried plastic gas line must have a tracer wire buried with it.
But there are leak locator services which can locate a leak. A service call will run $250 to $400 , so I would do a little digging first.

Thanks.... a digging we will go.... Will let you know. Thanks for your help.

Again, before you start digging, run the zone for an extend time. This should give you a wet spot that will at least cut down on the amount of digging. My earlier suggestion about capped off the risers would help, too.