Moving to Aargh 15 - riego valvula regulador

The garden and terrace have lots of plants that are watered with micro-drip irrigation. However, that is all plastic, 20 years old, and broken, clogged, or wide open. Some plants were totally soaked, others were.. not so much.

Sorry.

Others not so sorry. I mean geraniums. We're still too young for genaniums.

So, that needed replacement. I still had about 100 Gardena microdrippers.  Mostly the 4l/h versions:

Bought 400m 16mm tube from Atecnagua, for about 60€. Not bad. You punch a hole in the tube with a drill, insert the dripper, and done.

The below garden has now been hooked up to water. There are two watertimers in the little water shed outside. And a pressure regulator with a manometer. Nice. 

 Or, not so nice:

The pressure varies between 2 and 2.5, Gardena drippers want about 1.5. Unfortunately the regulator is not adjustable. It used to be, there's a rod in there that had a key in the past, now missing. Not reachable with pliers or anything engineer Jansen had available. He also mentioned corrosion.

Replace. 

Nice and shiny heavy brass, made in Italy, tap, regulator and manometer for 27€, Aquaconfort in Antas (good shop!) 

But, despite the amout of teflon tape engineer Jansen used: leaks. The interwebs say: 3 threads of teflon. Well, no. Leaks. 10 threads? No. Leaks.

Engineer Jansen remembered they used flax in the past to seal threads. Comercial Vera has flax: €20 for a container to seal 1000 threads. Hm. Pipe dope? Ah, there is is sealant stuff. He thought for 10€, but it was €20 on the bill. Hm.  So he spent 27€ on actual hardware and €20 for a bit of goo? Dang! 

You'd think at that price they'd make readable instructions on the label, and explain the packaging.  It's a complicated squeeze bottle, with a clever seal ring that you can pull up or push down to open and close. I was about to cut off the tip to open the bottle. Not necessary. Not great for €20 Herr Henkel!

Also, the goo is not purple but yellow. (Don’t eat yellow goo.)

Re-assembled, with goo applied, waited overnight to cure. Open the main valve.. and saw another drop fall off! Grrr! It's not 100% watertight, but no drops fall off any more. If you wipe a finger under one of the connections it's a bit damp. Unsatisfactory for perfectionists. Well, maybe it will seal itself, the water contains quite a bit of sediment. The water filter turns brown in a few weeks..

Riego Continuado Continuado

The irrigation system. Each tree has a ring of 16mm irrigation tube with 3 pin pricks to let water drip out. Well, after a week it doesn’t. The holes are too small, and clog up. Or, plastic creeps, and the holes close again.

Engineer Jansen is now switching to Gardena Micro drip. Gardena wants you to use them as in the picture below, stuck into the end of their proprietary 4.6 mm irigation tubes. As you can see the drippers have a thread, followed by a tapered thing.

The good news is that a 4.5 mm hole in the 16 mm tubes fits this gap quite nicely. The wall of the tubes snap right between the taper and the nut, so the drippers sit tight. The 4.5 mm hole simply is made by hand and a 4.5 mm drill. Each tree gets 3, each bougainvillea 1.

Inside the dripper there is a small plastic cylinder that moves and sort of regulates the dripping. I hope this does not clog up...

Gardena has a whole collection of thingies in their Micro-Drip™ system. The orange drippers yield 2 liter per hour, the black ones 4 l/h. As I want the water to be spread a bit I give each tree 3 orange drippers. Ony the very big trees (Paulownia) get 4 l/h drippers. 

200 drippers (25 for €6,80, which is cheap, they're double in NL!). That is 200 holes punched with a tool I made from a block of wood and a drill, inserted by hand, give it a turn, then use the pipe wrench to screw it in, then push it past the wedge. Three days hard work. Pff. Now I only need to dig in the tubes in the ground, as plastic tubes and Andalucían sun are not a great match.

Have a look at all the various drippers, sprayers, etc etc, see below, or  on https://www.gardena.com/uk/products/watering/micro-drip/