Irrigation Installation

0:00 [Music]

0:06 And I'm going to show you the difference between plowing and trenching. So, we want to be able to control that separately with all the newer controllers having Wi-Fi connection capability.

0:15 We didn't want to tear it up and leave them with a bunch of grass seeding to do and soil settling. We've got Abner trying to dig a trench, and it just overwhelmed the house. You couldn't enjoy the architecture of the home.

0:26 Can you go underneath of a sidewalk? We're going to open this up. This will be lawn, new sod lawn through here, and we can minimize any root damage to the trees.

0:32 So Jeremy with Cable Brothers, giving you a quick rundown of this landscape redesign and revamp that we're doing.

0:41 This is a client of ours we've worked with in the past, and they reached out to us and wanted to basically refresh the landscaping in the front of their home and the side. It's years and years old. There were just a lot of overgrown shrubs.

0:59 There were very little perennial flowers and shrubs, and it just overwhelmed the house. You couldn't enjoy the architecture of the home because of these overgrown, leggy shrubs.

1:07 So, we had the conversation about what they'd like to see. We walked them through a questionnaire of what style they like, what colors they like, what seasons are important to them, and a lot of different questions about that.

1:23 Then we came up with the design based on that. We left two shrubs remaining on either side of the front porch, and that's what they wanted to leave. The rest of this across here is basically a blank slate.

1:36 Starting at the corner of the house, we're going to have a nice evergreen flanking the corner of the house. We'll mirror that on the other side of the tall part of the house so that we have symmetry.

1:44 This is a very architecturally symmetrical house, and we wanted to kind of mirror that. From there stretching to the porch, and the same on the other side, we've got a boxwood hedge.

1:53 That'll also lend to that English garden feel with that hedge. Behind that hedge, we're going to have some hydrangeas that'll bloom through the summer.

2:01 In front of that, we've got perennials on perennials stacked in there. That's something the homeowner really wanted to see was a lot more color.

2:09 We've got red coral bells. We've got one of my favorites, Millennium Allium. It's a perennial allium. It's got a purple globe on it. They've already got some geraniums here, and we're going to keep those and work with it.

2:25 So, we really just bring a lot of life and color to the front, and that's the goal here.

2:34 Another thing the homeowner wanted to make sure that we preserve is all their lighting. You'll see we've got lighting wire pulled up. We went through and carefully pulled the wire out of the way so we do minimal damage to that. If we do damage it, we'll fix it immediately.

2:42 One of the things that I wanted to try to keep in mind with this design is how we can complement the architecture of the home.

2:50 We'll have a taller evergreen to soften up this corner where we've got a lot of brick, but then we want to step down and complement the windows with some hydrangeas and things that are going to stay lower and not get up above the window.

3:03 We've got a lilac tree going here on the corner. That'll give a bit of an offset to the corner. We'll have some roses and some daylilies to complement and finish off the corner here.

3:20 Originally, this was all covered up with shrubs here. We're going to open this up. This will be lawn, new sod lawn through here.

3:28 Back there, Mark's working on getting a bunch of debris cleared out, old landscape. We're completely redoing this side yard with new lawn and getting rid of a lot of unwanted landscape beds.

3:37 Here we've got a couple boulders that we'll be using in the landscape. These are native to Ohio, these gray limestone boulders. We use them a lot.

3:45 We're saving some perennials that the homeowner wanted to save. We got those dug up and set aside carefully. We can plant them for them, or they can plant them where they want them.

3:53 There's just a lot of ivy and ground cover beds through here. Those are going to get turned into lawn. You see, we got a white painted line through here. That's going to be the new bed edge with some nice plantings around the AC unit.

4:01 This is going to be easy-to-use lawn.

4:10 One of the things I would like to point out would be job site organization, and something that we're not perfect in, but we'll do our best to keep your home as organized as possible.

4:19 This is one example where the guys are keeping attachments for the machinery, hand tools, and materials kind of all set in one spot instead of just scattered out all over the entire job site.

4:26 We've got a job site trailer. So, instead of just everything laid out and sprawled out all over sidewalks and driveways, we're going to keep our materials in the trailer and pull from that as we need.

4:43 [Music]

4:55 I'm going to show you the difference between plowing and trenching and why we would do one or the other and in what circumstances.

5:04 Right here, we've got this home in Oakwood with an existing lawn, and we didn't want to tear it up and leave them with a bunch of grass seeding to do and soil settling.

5:12 Essentially, if you were to trench the entire yard, which can be a bit cheaper, you would have a cut through the lawn that looks about like this, and you would have the soil laid to the side.

5:29 Then we would put all our pipes and wire and everything in for the irrigation system, and then that would get backfilled. The problem with that is, with an existing lawn, that has to settle.

5:36 That's going to take a few weeks to a few months, and then it's got to be grass-seeded or new sod.

5:44 In this case, we've got existing lawn. We can plow it in. So, there's actually a pipe and a wire already in here. You can actually see that coming out here.

5:53 The only reason we have trenched this section is to bore underneath the sidewalk.

6:01 So, if we plow your pipe in for irrigation, we will have to do a little bit of digging to make the connections and to put in the sprinkler head.

6:14 Everything else will look like this. Once it's all said and done, it's hard to tell that we were even there and put in an entire underground irrigation system.

6:22 If we're in a new construction home and we don't have any sod, it's obviously much faster to just trench everything and open it up.

6:30 There are advantages to that. You can make sure that there are no rocks in the trench, no rocks that are going to compress on the pipe and cause problems in the future. Plowing, we don't have that advantage.

6:42 One of the things that we often have a conversation with our clients about is the tree lawn or right-of-way lawn, depending on what you want to call it. That's between the city sidewalk and the curb at the street.

6:51 What we've seen done a lot of times, probably just to cut cost, is to put one sprinkler out by the curb at the street and have that sprinkler shoot across the sidewalk that I'm standing on now to reach the front lawn of the house.

7:08 There are a couple problems with that. One is, usually the irrigation's running early in the morning, and so there's a risk of somebody jogging or walking the sidewalk and the sprinkler hitting them in the face.

7:17 We want to avoid that. We want to be able to control that separately. So, if we can run just this area by itself, that helps us give more control over what's getting watered, when, and how much.

7:33 A couple important pieces on any irrigation system, and this is a residential one, are a backflow preventer and the controller.

7:41 On this backflow preventer here on this particular home, the water supply meter is all inside. In some cases it'll be out in the front lawn, and we'll have a plumber come in, put in a separate meter, and run that up depending on the size of the system.

7:58 In this one, it's all inside. We had our certified plumber come out and plumb out of the wall, and then we install the backflow.

8:07 This is a removable one for the winter so it can be winterized easily.

8:12 We've got Abner trying to dig a trench and trying not to cut any wires.

8:19 Here we've got our controller, and we've got a Hunter Hydrawise. This is outside. The older way of doing this was to have the controller in the garage or the basement somewhere inside, so you could access it without having to come out in the rain or inclement weather to mess with it.

8:31 But now, with all the newer controllers having Wi-Fi connection capability, that's not so much of an issue. It comes in a waterproof box. You don't have to worry about that ever being a problem.

8:46 We can just pull up an app on our phone and connect to it. The homeowner can, we can if they want us to. That gives us a ton of different benefits.

8:55 You don't have to step foot outside the home, and if there's ever any issue with the system, we can shut it down remotely and make adjustments without having to make a costly service call out to the property.

9:10 One quick thing I wanted to point out on this particular irrigation job is this massive historic oak tree. This is in Oakwood, rightly named, and the homeowner wanted to make sure we do minimal damage to the root system of this tree.

9:27 I would agree, it's a beautiful tree. So what we did with the irrigation design on this property in particular is made sure that everything we're putting into the ground is out around the perimeter as far as possible.

9:36 You'll see these blue flags out around the perimeter, but there's nothing up through here. Typically, if there was no tree here, we'd have some sprinkler heads up through here.

9:48 With the design, we were able to push everything out to the perimeter and have those sprinkler heads spray up towards the tree, and we can minimize any root damage to the tree.

10:01 So, a question that folks have sometimes is, can you go underneath of a sidewalk? Yeah, absolutely. And it's actually pretty easy.

10:05 You'll see here we've got this sod cut and laid aside, and then we dug this trench through here.

10:13 What we do is we can drop a sleever tool in here. It's basically a metal rod that a pipe slides over, and we would just drive that under the sidewalk, obviously making sure no utilities are in the way.

10:20 Once we're through, we can just pull that sleeve tool out, and we have a pipe underneath that we can run our wire through. We can run several pipes through, one for water that we can connect our pipes to, one for running wire through, whatever we need for that.

10:36 What we have going on here then is we've got the pipe getting glued together and laid out across the yard. This is a situation where this pipe is getting plowed in instead of trenched so we can minimize turf damage and leave the place looking like we hardly touched it.

10:54 Right down here, we've got Abner getting pipe glued together, and we'll just get it laid out. It'll look like you've got white tubes laying all over the yard for a little bit, but pretty soon that'll all be underground.

11:07 Basically, it gets stitched in with a vibratory plow, and you won't see much after that. So, that's part of the process of getting ready for plowing in your irrigation system.