How to Fix it when your Soaker Hose Isn't Watering Evenly

How to Fix it when your Soaker Hose Isn't Watering Evenly
Tips and Tricks

Everyone gets frustrated when they stretch out the soaker hose and turn on the water. The first part of the hose does too much, the drips come out way too fast,even to the point that the water runs off and doesn't soak in; so you need to turn down the water pressure, right?.

But the other, far end of the hose is the opposite, nothing coming out at all. So part of your garden gets flooded and the other part at the end of the hose never gets any water.

How to fix this dilemma? In this video I discuss tips and tricks for how to get more even watering distribution from your soaker hose.
First remember that you should always have very low pressure to the hose, so just barely open the spigot. Too much pressure will cause leakage at the joint where your garden hose attaches to the soaker hose. Most soaker hoses come with a blocker that only lets in a little pressure, leave that in there! Otherwise the small holes would burst open with the pressure and spray water around like a sprinkler. That is not what we want.

There are two main strategies for getting the soaker hose to more evenly distribute the water down the entire length of the hose.

First, use gravity to your advantage - if you can set out the hose along a slope or hill, gravity will assist the water to get all the way to the end before it all dribbles out the holes in the first few feet of the hose. If you only have flat garden areas, try putting the first part of the hose up on a mound and gradually string the rest of the hose so that it ends up at least a few inches lower that it started. If you have raised beds, you can bury the soaker hose in the soil, starting out near the surface and burying the hose deeper and deeper to the end.

Second, a strategy of laying out the hose in ess-curve or snaking it back and forth. Since the beginning of the hose drips more water faster, your S-curves should be long and wide. As you lay out the rest of the hose, the S-curves should be closer together so that more hose covers the same amount of ground, since the hose further toward the end drips less water very slowly.

With a little planning ahead of laying out the hose, and when you combine these two techniques, you will find that the end of the soaker hose can be much more useful and you can get a much better equal or even distribution of water across your garden.

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