Hey, I’m Shawn from Sprinkler Daddy and in this video I just wanted to talk a little bit about something that we don’t use a whole bunch but had a few questions about and what that is is an autodrain valve at the end of your sprinkler line.
So, basically, an autodrain valve is—instead of having a—just your—at the end of your line an elbow—a line elbow with your sprinkler come out, what you would do is instead of the elbow fitting, you’d out a straight through, run a little bit more pipe and then you would install this autodrain valve on the end of your line just with an insert fitting to adapt into your polypipe and then you just put that in there. You might wanna put some rock underneath there or whatever. But basically, what this autodrain valve does is when there’s pressure coming at it from the sprinkler system—so when you open up your line, your sprinklers or your—this drain valve is going to stay shut so that you can still get water pressure going to your sprinkler heads and you can water your lawn. But when that pressure drops, what this valve—autodrain valve does is it opens up and lets the water drain out of the sprinkler line. So you can put at least one of these, if you think about doing this, it’s not necessary by any means but if you’re thinking about doing it, you can add an autodrain valve to the end of each line and in any low spots that you’ve got and basically what that does is it allows just the water to drain out of the lines that you’re not having water siting in the lines when you’re not watering the system. So that can help when you’re talking about unexpected frosts in the spring or in the fall. You still will wanna blow out your sprinkler lines at the end of the year just to make sure all of the water does get out of the lines. I wouldn’t recommend putting this in to replace that aspect of the system but it will help with the—like say you get a freeze up in the spring when you’re not planning on it and you’re already had your sprinklers on and this can help guard against that. And also, it can help against—with backflow prevention—it’s not ideal for backflow prevention but basically when you get—if you do get reverse suction on your lines, backflow, the autodrain valve in effect should mitigate that risk because the water should be drained out of the sprinkler lines so there should be nothing to suck back into the water supply. So, it’s not full approved by any means but its one thing that you might wanna consider adding on to your sprinkler system as an extra feature.
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