Colorado Landscaping Timeline

Hi, I’m Stephanie from Timberline Landscaping, and today we’re going to give you a brief tutorial on how to drain your irrigation system. This time of year, it’s very important to drain your irrigation system overnight when we get freezing temperatures. It’s going to help protect the portions of your irrigation system that are above ground. You can still turn your irrigation system back on during the day when temperatures warm up to keep the water going to your turf areas and other plant materials.

We’re going to start out inside of your house with how to turn off the water to your irrigation system. So here we are inside of the home. We’re going to turn off the water; that’s our first step. It’s going to be near to your water heater and other systems. Yours may not look exactly like this but should be similar. So you’ve got your main water shut-off for the house, which would be these valves here. Your irrigation system is going to tee off of that main line. So here is where our irrigation turns off. You can see that here our valve is in line with the pipe, which means that the water is turned on to the system. So we’re just going to turn that 90 degrees to shut off the water. Since we’ve done it at the tee, we’ve only turned off the water to the irrigation system itself, which is going to keep the water going to the rest of your home.

So for our next step, we are out at our backflow. This is typically going to be on the side of your home. You’re going to have something that looks very similar to this. We’ve got two valves here; currently they are open. We’re going to partially close them by turning them to a 45 degree angle. We don’t want to close it all the way because we don’t want to block that water in completely. We want to leave room for it to escape and move as things freeze. Next, we’re going to take a dime, penny, or a screwdriver and we’re going to turn our test cocks here to a 45 degree angle as well. You just want to match it up with the angle of your ball valve. So here we’ve got two of them; you may have more of these that you need to open. And lastly here, we are just going to open our valve at the bottom, and you will see some water escaping to let that water drain out. That means that we can now have this prepped, all of the water drained out, so that we’re good to go for a freeze overnight.

So for our third and final step, we’re back at the water shut-off. You want to have a bucket for this step. Right where we have the water turned off, we’ve got a small valve here. Keep your bucket handy because when you open this, water is going to come out. Catch as much as you can in there and just open that valve up. This is draining the rest of your system. So now that the water is flushed out of the system, we want to make sure we put this cap back on here nice and tight.

So now that your system is drained, it’s protected from freezing temperatures overnight. Here in Colorado where we are, it’s still very important to have your system blown out before we get some of those harder temperatures over the winter. That’s going to make sure that you’re protecting your pipes that are under the ground when that ground starts to freeze. For us, we recommend doing it around the middle to end of October to ensure that you protect your entire irrigation system. Thanks so much for joining us for how to drain your irrigation system.