Let me tell you a story. First of all, I will give you some background. In Utah, if you want your lawn to live, you need to water it somehow. Otherwise by the end of June your grass is crispy and dead, which probably makes mowing easier but isn’t very pleasant looking. If you are lucky, you live in a house with an automatic sprinkler system that takes care of the watering for you. We are among those lucky ones only because the fall before we moved in, Devon’s cousins were living in the house and they put in the sprinkler system with his uncle. Then they got a job in Texas and moved out and we were the lucky ones that got to enjoy having the sprinkler system when we moved in the following spring. They also re-did the lawn after installing the spinkler system and it looks great. So great that I’m absolutely paranoid about killing it. Anyway, so we move in and take over caretaking duties on the house. Smooth sailing with the sprinklers until this year, all because of this:

That, my friends, is an O-ring. Except right now, it looks like a C-ring. It’s supposed to look like this:

Let me tell you the story of all the trouble caused by this little O-ring. So Devon is at home on break, minding his own business, when Pleasant Grove Water Works knocks on our door and informs him that our east sprinkler section was running too long so they shut off our irritgation water. This section of sprinklers has on occasion been known to get stuck on, but this year it has happened a couple times and this time Pleasant Grove noticed before we were able to manually turn it off. We call the city and have them turn the water back on, but we realize something has to be done because we are leaving for vacation in a few days and with hot weather ahead it would be very bad if the sprinklers got stuck running and the city turns off the water again. We research online and talk to people and it seems like the valve is the problem. We find the valve box, open it and lo and behold, one of the valves is dripping. See the water between on the ground between the first and second valves? (Also see the giant spider web in the corner of the box? Ick. It housed a giant spider, which we sprayed the heck out of with spider killer spray. No, we’re not humane.)

We figure this is the problem, and go buy a new valve. Devon installs it the day we leave while I’m frantically packing and getting ready for our trip. Installation is successful, until we turn on the water and now the new valve is dripping too, and even more than before. After a minor freakout by me (“Aaaaaahhh! What are we going to do!!!!! It’s not fixed!!! We can’t leave the water shut off!!!”) we run over to our kind and wonderful neighbors and hire the neighbor kid to turn on the water for that section manually every other day and have the rest of the lawn water automatically. Good neighbors are priceless, and ours are more than good.

Flash forward, we come back from vacation and the drip has now almost filled the whole box with water. We (and by we I mean Devon) turn off the water and take the whole valve manifold apart and find that the leak is the broken O-ring. Yay! We found the problem! We run to Home Depot to get a new one. Sadly, they don’t have one. By the way, probably the most annoying place to be in the summer is the irrigation aisle at Home Depot. It’s always full of people walking around with glazed looks on their faces holding a broken piece of sprinkler equipment. No one knows what they are doing and it’s impossible to find anything. Anyway, we decide we’ll need to look at an actual sprinkler store, so the next day Devon runs to Sprinkler World. The friendly people at Sprinkler World (they really are friendly. And knowledable. It’s a great place that you hope you don’t need to go to.) give him the bad news. They don’t carry that kind of manifold because – and here’s the fun part – when one part of it breaks you have to replace the whole thing. That’s right, folks, the WHOLE thing. Even just for a little O-ring. So Devon buys a new manifold. Brings it home, realizes the manifold is too big for the current box. Buys a bigger box. Digs out old box, moving a lot of water-soaked clay soil. Fun. Realizes the tubes to connect to the manifold are now too short so he needs to add extentions. Needs glue for that. After two trips to Sprinkler World and two trips to Home Depot, he finally has it looking like this:

He hooked it up just as it was getting dark and we tested them. They work! We filled in the hole and hope we don’t have any more sprinkler repairs this year. All because of one little O-ring.