Your Lawn Sprinkler is Probably Broken Right Now
Learn how to do a quick sprinkler head replacement on your lawn's watering system. Stop dealing with broken equipment and get your sprinklers back in working order.
Equipment You May Need
The Fix
A sprinkler head that leaks around the base, sprays in the wrong pattern, or barely pops up anymore is a five-minute fix — and one of the most commonly ignored ones, since it's easy to just live with a weak spot in the lawn instead of digging in.
Why Heads Fail
Lawn mowers, foot traffic, and just plain age crack the internal seals and gears inside a pop-up sprinkler head. The riser and the buried pipe underneath are almost never the problem — it's the head itself, which is designed to be a simple twist-off, twist-on replacement.
The Swap
Unscrew the old head from the riser (most are a standard 1/2" thread), wrap the riser threads with a couple wraps of Teflon tape, and thread the new head on hand-tight plus a quarter turn. Run the zone to check the spray pattern and adjust the arc before calling it done.