Spring in Utah is both exciting and scary. Exciting in that it’s time to pull out the shorts and short sleeve shirts and say goodbye to the pants and coats and soak up some sunshine! We’ve missed you sun! But scary in that it’s time to check and test your sprinkler system to see how your pipes survived (if at all) the bitter cold winter. Seeing as we put in our backyard system last summer, we were both a little nervous about turning them on. We didn’t want to even turn them on until it started to get really warm and not so rainy (mid to end of May) but we wanted to put some grass seed over some spots that weren’t doing as well, so we needed to turn them on to water that. So, we just had to test them. We first turned on the front and everything seemed to be fine. Oh good! So far so good. Then we turned on the first line to the back and again everything seemed to be fine. YES! Then we turned the second line on to the back and oh no, not so good. Water was only spitting out of one of the eight heads so we knew we had a break. DANG IT!! Now the trick was to find the break, which in our yard, there was no convenient place for it to be. It was either going to be under the grass or under the long side yard of wood chips. No fun. We both ignored the problem for about a week and just watered the grass with the hose or water would fall from the sky. But then we both remembered we were adults and figured we should probably find the stupid leak. So, I was in charge of turning the water on and off while Jeff walked around the yard looking for soft spots. After about five minutes, he tells me to turn the water off. You found it?? He said he did and I asked him where it was and he said it would be more fun for me to just come look. Oh great, it’s in the middle of the yard, isn’t it??? He has me walk over to the other side of the yard from where we thought the break was and he says, take a little jump and look over the fence. I did and what I saw was a little LAKE in my neighbors backyard. AAGGHH!! The water had been shooting out of this broken pipe and had literally washed away a ton of dirt under our sidewalk into our neighbors backyard. Not pretty. Luckily, our neighbors haven’t finished their backyard so nothing was ruined. Jeff went over and apologized for the mess and we went back inside glad that we had found the leak. A friend of ours so willingly came over a couple of days later to find the leak for us and discovered that it was in a pipe to nowhere. When we put the sprinklers in, we had a lot of friends come over and help but Jeff didn’t explain what we wanted clearly enough so we ended up with one pipe to nowhere that was capped off. So, when we turned the sprinklers off last October, water just stayed in this pipe, froze during the winter and exploded when it got warmer. This is what the pipe looked like:

SERIOUSLY awesome.
Thanks to great friends it’s now fixed and hopefully we won’t have any more problems. Bring on the sun!