SPRINKLER TALK FORUM - You Got Questions, We've Got Answers

A manifold is really just a bunch of valves collected in one place.

When you talk about manifolds that you buy, that's usually talking about the pipes that can be assymboled without "gluing" a bunch of pieces togethere to form your manifold.

When you build a manifold your self, you just have to cut all the pipes yourself, and it can be a process that takes MANY hours (because you have to get the pipe lengths just right, all the pipes need to roughly line up, and every glue joint takes about 2 minutes to do when consider you have to prime the joint, let the primer dry, apply the glue, put the pieces together, hold them for 15-30 seconds to let the glue setup, etc).

But with a distributed system like you are describing, there is no "maniflod". The closest thing you would have that you might have what you could call a manifold would be if the Tees that feed each of the valves were all located in a central spot. But I would assume you really plan on something like a single mainline that sort of circules the yard, and you just tie the valve into this mainline at the point you want the valve.

Of course for a really large system, you might still have a mainline circuling the yard and have multiple manifolds located in different locations. A perfect example of this would be if you had a system with say 4 zones in the front yard and 4 zones in the back yard. Near the point of connection in the front yard, you might have the manifold for the front yard. But you then extend the mainline to the back yard and have a second manifold back there for the back yard.



HTH