I’m as guilty as the next person when it comes to keeping my sprinkler heads cleaned out. With all the work in the yard during the summer, I have less and less time to cut away the grass around the sprinkler heads. Unfortunately, this leads to the heads disappearing one by one in my lawn. So, trying to find where they are located can be tricky. Here are three different methods I use for those heads that prove difficult to locate.
Finding Buried Sprinkler Heads (The Short Answer)
If your sprinkler heads have become overgrown with grass and buried under the soil, then here are three methods you can use to locate them quickly. First, you can start by running your irrigation system and listening to the sound of water and puddles forming. Second, you can follow your irrigation layout plan. Finally, you can use a metal detector to detect the heads.
Things to Be Careful of When Searching for Buried Sprinkler Heads in Your Yard
One method I would definitely avoid when figuring out how to find buried sprinkler heads is to use a shovel or a spade. If you go searching around your yard for irrigation heads by stabbing a spade into the ground in the area you believe the head might be, you’ll probably end up damaging the sprinkler heads, or, even worse, you might end up breaking one of the underground pipes.
So, leave the digging tools in the garage and try one of my other methods instead.
How to Find Buried Sprinkler Heads (3 Things to Try)
I have put together three methods that I use to find hidden irrigation heads that have been covered in grass and buried under the soil. Let’s take a look and see if we can locate your missing sprinkler heads.
Listen for Water & Look for Puddles
My go-to method is listening for water and looking for puddles. This is by far the quickest way to locate missing sprinkler heads, and you don’t need any special equipment. All you need to do is switch on your sprinkler systems and walk around your yard.
So, switch on your system, then listen for the sound of water spraying out of the heads underground. Once you find them, mark them with a landscaping flag, so you can come back later and cut them out. Now, if you have one or two that are really buried and you can’t hear any water rushing, you can wait for a puddle to start forming. Usually, I’ll walk across my lawn and find squishy areas. This is a good indication that I’m pretty close. Then I take one of my irrigation flags and start poking it into the ground.
Usually, it only takes a minute or two to poke into something solid, which is usually the sprinkler head I’m trying to find.
Follow Your Irrigation Plan
If you had your sprinkler system installed by a professional company, then they usually give you a plan of the layout showing where all the pipe runs and where the heads are located. So, if you use a tape measure along with the measurements from the plan, you should be able to track down your missing heads.
Now, this isn’t particularly easy because the plans are usually slightly different from the actual installation, but it will point you in the right direction. So, pick a point on your layout, say, the timer box or one of the heads that isn’t buried, and use the measurement provided to work out the distance to the next head. Then, extend your tape measure to the required distance and start looking in that general area.
Again, I would buy a landscaping flag from Home Depot or Lowe’s to stab into the lawn to pinpoint the buried head. This isn’t the easiest method to use, but it will at least have you searching in the right area.
Use a Metal Detector
Last on my list of how to find buried sprinkler heads is to use some type of sprinkler head detector. Now, unless you want to spend a fortune on ground-penetrating radar equipment or a service locator, you can grab a cheap metal detector. Luckily, sprinkler heads usually have metal parts inside the top of the head, like the spray adjustment screw, and sometimes inside the gears that make the heads turn.
So, take your metal detector to a head that isn’t buried and set the sensitivity. This is so that the metal detector knows what it’s looking for. If you don’t set the sensitivity, you’ll end up detecting any piece of metal that happens to be in the ground. Bottle caps and nails aren’t going to help you find your missing heads.
Next, set the detector, then head out, sweeping the area. When your metal detector picks up something in the ground, stab the area with one of your landscape flags and see if you have found a missing head.
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