Hi, this is Skip with Father and Son Pest and Lawn Solutions. And today what I'd like to talk to you about is how to repair a small leak or nick in an irrigation pipe. So what happens a lot of times is, especially if you have like an index irrigation system and you have the index valves with three or four or five pipes coming down from the valve into the ground, and maybe you weed eat around those pipes, and the weed eater string has a tendency to put a groove in some of those pipes.
Well, you know, initially you might think the only way to fix that leak in that pipe is to take the valve all apart, fix all the pipes, which is a big issue. It's a big job, but there's a way that if you just have a small nick in a pipe, that you can put a patch over that pipe and save yourself a lot of work. Especially if maybe you're digging in your yard and you happen in nick and irrigation pipe with a shovel, put a small crack in it or something like that, rather than digging out the whole pipe and putting in a, you know, repairing the whole pipe, there's a way that you can, you can just patch that small nick, and I'm going to show you how to do that right now.
So I've got a piece of irrigation pipe and I've created what represents us small nick in this pipe. This is a one inch pipe. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how to fix if you have nick like that, how to fix that pipe real easy. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut off a small piece of this pipe, probably just enough, you know, about an inch at the end of the pipe.
And these are some PVC cutters that I have here, they're very good thing to have if you're working with PVC pipe. So I've got this small piece of pipe cutout, and it's going to go over that injury that that pipe has. What I'm going to do is I'm going to cut this piece long ways now. I'm going to just slice it right down the middle, like that so it comes apart. Now you have to use thin wall PVC pipe in order to do this. It's thin wall, the thick wall, or sometimes it's referred to a schedule 40 pipe, is too thick and it's not as pliable as the thin wall is to do something like this. So if you're going to do this, you got to make sure that you have the thin wall pipe.
So I've got my piece cut out here and I've got my PVC glue. So what I'm going to do, is I'm going to cover the area that this patch is going to go on around with the glue. And then I'm going to put glue on the inside of the patch as well, like that. Then I'm going to pull the patch apart and let it snap over the pipe. Like that. And I'm going to move it around just a little bit to make sure that the glue gets set really well.
Now you can see it doesn't come all the way together in the back. That's okay, because as long as the whole doesn't come all the way there. So it's going to separate a little bit in the back, but as long as it covers the area where the pipe is injured. And so we let it sit there for three or four minutes. You can see it's already starting to set up, and after about three or four minutes that will be glued and the leak will be fixed. So that's a real quick and easy way to fix a small leak in an irrigation pipe.
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