<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Wet_Boots</i>
<br />Your inquiry of 4/26 was a request for someone to write a how-to tutorial for you. Expect such posts to go unanswered. If you can't find the information online, then watch the next repairman you hire, and write your own tutorial.
I can't agree with a $80 price for a stainless I-20, but allow me to express my admiration and envy for that repairman's ambition. <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
FYI the $80 price was for plain vanilla plastic, not ss. And what you profess to admire pretty much says it all: just what you would do if only you thought you could pull it off, right? As for my request to "write a how-to tutorial," what I asked was for information about the
"sort of parts and/or specialized tools I should order in addition to the rotors"
Doesn't sound like a request for a tutorial to me; it's not about system design, or coverage, or what sort of heads, or anything but the most basic question, tantamount to my asking "Are there any tips I should keep in mind in replacing an old broken rotor?" If that's the kind of proprietary information you're so loathe to share you ought to feel defensive.
Where we are is suburban Boston, but what conceivable difference does that make? An I20 is $12.84 on the website associated with this whatever you want to call it, and it's the same whether you're in Chestnut Hill or Colorado Springs. I likewise have no idea whether HD sells Hunter rotors; I was just reacting to heaviside's reference to a "big box store," by which I assume he meant HD, Lowes or Walmart. But they are pretty widely available on the web and that's the standard of comparison.
As for the backflow preventers it was incomptence or negligence pure and simple. The shut-offs are (and were) just fine, thanks. The lines weren't fully cleared in the fall; when the ice inside the preventers melted in the spring it just popped the valves and cracked the casing. We discovered it -- like a broken rotor it's hard to miss -- and our plumber -- who in contrast with the irrigation company is competent, reliable, and honest -- is the one who drew the inference about what went wrong.
We've spent two years rennovating a 100 year old house, mostly generalling the work ourselves. We've been really fortunate to be dealing with honorable tradesmen who pass through the materials costs directly and bill us for their time. We've had only two bad experiences, one with a painter who represented himself to be top drawer, then subbed out the work for a fixed fee of 1/3 the contract price to a crew of undocumented aliens who were unable to complete the job as quickly as their fixed fee contemplated, at which point everyone got tense, we figured out what was going on, and just fired the painter. The other is the irrigation work. The contractor at one level is fair: he charges an hourly rate for labor and is honest about his time. I'm happy to pay that fee. I'd be happy to pay a reasonable markup on the rotors in exchange for the convenience of not having to do it myself. I don't begrudge a business making a fair buck. And if I were installing a new system I'd expect to have to pay for the expertise and effort that went into the system design. But that is not what this is about, and it isn't what my earlier post was about. As for our existing system, everyone agrees that new Hunters are superior to 15-20 year-old Toro's, but even with the old Vision II control unit and replacement of heads as they fail the system as a whole pretty much does its job. We fix it only to the extent it's broke, which thus far has been all but confined to replacing rotors.
You have to decide for yourselves what's reasonable for that. I'd guess that, charging $35 for a $12 item, plus labor (probably a minimum of an hour), plus (probably, if you have to go out and replace a single rotor) some fixed start-up fee for th