Brighton Reticulation

When You Break the Tap off the Water Meter

Have you ever found a water meter that either won’t turn on or off? Like the tap is just stuck? This week it happened again – about the third time in 11 years but I knew what to expect. The water meter was on but the tap timer I had installed was leaking a little and I went to turn it off and fix the seal. But it wouldn’t budge – and I knew that taking the grandpa wrench to it was most likely going to snap it. So I called the homeowner out, explained the situation (the water had […]

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If You Look Hard Enough

Yesterday I went to try and sort out why the retic pipe kept bursting on a bore in Ridgewood. Usually there is an obvious answer. The first step was a new controller and then a check that the solenoids were all opening as they should have been. All good there. I dug a hole and found two 25mm pipes going to the rear yard – but with no water coming out of the sprinklers. I drilled small holes at various points along the pipes and water cane out. Hmmm… water is definitely getting thru, is there a blockage somewhere? Has […]

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Reticulation in Jindowie with Poor Water Pressure

  Recently I laid the main retic line for a client in Jindowie (a part of Yanchep). I’ve written before about water pressure issues in this part of the world and today we hit the same problem again. I use Richdel solenoids 99% of the time, but today they wouldn’t seal. They need a certain amount of backpressure and the water being what it is up here I just couldn’t get them to work. I changed them for Hunter PGVs and they worked fine. I’m not sure why Hunters will operate with the lower pressure, but they seem to be the […]

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Here’s an Idea…

Remember those old holiday shacks with grass driveways that always showed the furrows where the car had been driven into the asbestos shed at the back of the property? Well maybe grass driveways are on the return. This story in the news today is about a local Perth bloke who installed a special grass driveway using ‘Grass-Cel technology and now the council don’t believe it conforms to their specs… ‘Grass-Cel’ turf pavers are made of porous recycled plastic overlaid with soil and seeded with grass. They take the brunt of a car while allowing grass to grow undamaged. I guess its not everyone’s […]

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PVC Pipe Blowout

This is unusual. I was called to a job in Jindalee where the PVC pipe had simply blown out. Where you can see the hole the PVC is soft and pliable and for some reason it had blown there. Occasionally this happens but I haven’t figured out why yet…

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Dismal Water Pressure For Reticulation?

If you find your new home has very poor water flow/pressure then you might want to take a look at your water meter and see if its been fitted with a restrictor. This week I arrived to do a job on a local property only to discover the water flow was absolutely abysmal – around 10 litres / minute and barely enough to get two half sprays sprinklers up and running. With turf arriving in a few hours the retic needed completing so I texted my local plumber a pic of the meter and he advised me that it was fitted […]

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Reticulation Solenoid Puzzle in Yanchep

On Friday I had a call from a client in Yanchep who had installed a solenoid, but was having problems. The two stations in the back were coming on together.   So I went out to see what was going on.   What was odd was that the two rear stations came on together but they didn’t come on when the front retic station was running. Normally if a solenoid fails open it stays on with every other station.   But in this case station one came on, then station two and three together.   Odd…   So I checked: […]

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My Retic Won’t Shut Off

For people with Hunter X Core Controllers this is one of the most common issues and it arises because the controller is incorrectly programmed. What happens is the system comes on at 5.00am (or whenever you have set it for) runs thru the whole cycle and then does it again… and again… and again… The problem is more than one identical start time being set. By that I mean that start time 1 is 5.00am, start time 2 is 5.00am and then start time 3 is 5.00am. For some reason this confuses the machine and causes it behave in this […]

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There is Always a Way

  This week I went to do a job that involved connecting the rear retic (running off a tap) to the main system at the front. In doing the quote I noticed a thin 70ml channel down the side of the house where liquid limestone ended and the fence began. I figured that with a thin trenching shovel we could get enough dirt out to lay pipe and wire… That all made sense but I forgot to take into account the fence post right smack bang in the middle of that 70ml channel. I was about to go and see […]

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How Many Volts Does My Retic Need?

I was working on a friend’s place recently with a strange fault that was proving difficult to track down. The solenoid would come on and off intermitently. It would work 10 times in a row and then fail. There was power (27V) coming from the control box but at the solenoid the power varied between 22-26v according to my multimeter. The power wire to the solenoid had been joined several times before it reached the solenoid and after eliminating any other possibilities (faulty coil/controller) I could only conclude that there was a problem with the wire run. I ran a […]

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