IMO , lead contamination from plastic water hose working gloves, brass fittings are overblown and misinterpreted. NUMBER ONE: When they say a certain plastic hose has 500 ppm of lead, it does NOT mean that the water that comes out of it has 500 ppm of lead. In the link provided, they sited that in one of their tests, the water sample from ONE of the plastic hoses tested contained 0.28 ppm of lead. So that might have been the highest detection they found in their digging, if not misrepresented. NUMBER TWO: The water that comes out of a plastic garden hose is not for direct drinking. You water your garden with it. So if there is a trace of LEAD it is going to be absorbed by the soil and further become diluted. NOW, the NEXT question is how much of that lead will be absorbed wit the plants and how much of that absorbed lead is going to be present in the edible part of the plant : PROBABLY next to nothing. Probably most soils already have higher trace of lead before you water them. The meaningful researched would have been to water certain vegetable with the worse plastic garden hose all season and then measure the amount of lead within that vegetable. So, I don't know about you folhs, but I am not going to throw away my garden hose, working glove and brass fittings, knee pads .. tomorrow and try to find lead free replacement for those items.

AM, Yes most controllers are not as flexible as you would like. The more money the more flexibility. I am not even aware of a 6 program controller. Someone may know. What was the old one that you used? I just need to gather more information from you to make an informed suggestion. I need to know your flow rate of your water source. Is your system off a outdoor house faucet or the mainline from your house before your house pressure regulator? If a hose faucet, then fill a five-gallon bucket and time how long to fill. Give us the time to fill 5-gallons. Next is the drip ones, how long or how many and what spacing and the type of drip lines or emitters? How many sprinklers and what Brand/type for each zone? What I am looking for is flow rates of drip tape or emitters to calculate the water demand for each zone. This is like a design in reverse which is a water audit. If you don't have all the info give me as much as you can. Finally, what is your water pressure? Buy an inexpensive pressure gauge that fits on your faucet from hardware store. When I can tell what zone uses what amount of what, then you can tell what zones can run simultaneously and the ones that need extra time can be at a later time and duration. You might try buying another Controller and hook three zone to one and 3 zone to another for the 6 programs you need. JMHO Aloha

I prefer http://www.dripirrigation.com/ Their shipping costs are cheap for the lightweight stuff (emitters, couplers, etc). If you ever need heaver hoses and stuff, you're probably better off getting that at the local home improvement stores. Those kits are pretty nice to start out with. You can always add to it as your situation changes. As far as simplest program. The drip tape, t-tape and soaker hoses are the easiest because you don't have to fuss with all the individual emitters. Of course that takes some of the flexibility out of things, but it's not a bad way to go.

I hope someone who has a technical way of doing things will answer your question about water pressure because that's beyond my scope of experience. I'm not technically-inclined at all and my eyes glaze over when irrigation guys start taking about water flow and gallons per hour and so forth. We have very high water pressure at our outside spigot and have to use a pressure regulator to make the flow of water low and slow. In many rural areas, the local water co-op installs the water line with high pressure available since lots of rural folks have either agricultural or animal needs that require higher water pressure out on the land than you would have inside your house, and then you install (or your homebuilder's plumber installs) a pressure reducer before the water enters the house so that the high pressure doesn't destroy things in the house. On the day I came up from Ft. Worth to be here when the water co-op workers installed our water line, they told me over and over again about the need for a pressure reducer to be used when water was piped into the house after it was built. (Clearly they understood that they were dealing with a city girl who didn't even know what a pressure regulator was, but I got their message loud and clear.) If you are in a standard urban or suburban neighborhood, you may not have extemely high pressure like we have out here in the country, but you still likely will need a pressure regulator on your drip irrigation system. Drip irrigation systems used for residential landscaping and home gardens are low-pressure, low-flow and, in fact, 'slow and gentle' is the way you want them to work, so I cannot imagine that you wouldn't have enough water pressure unless your property is hilly and you're trying to run water uphill and downhill all at the same time (which is possible, by the way, but requires some pressure-compensating components). Hopefully your yard is relatively level as that will make the installation and use of drip irrigation very easy. If your garden beds are raised, they make risers that carry the water up into each raised bed. Here's what I did with my first drip irrigation project: I went to Home Depot and bought a kit. I installed it following the directions that came with it. I turned it on. It worked. Period. See how easy that was. It was a different story with the big drip system running off the outside faucet to the veggie garden which is much larger and more complicated, so I was glad my first experience was with a smaller, more simple system that was a lot less complicated and less intimidating. That sort of paved the way for having a larger system later on as the veggie garden got bigger and bigger over the years. Later on, when we chose to expand the drip irrigation system, I spent hours poring over a catalog and reading it, learning the difference between different types of system components, and then I just ordered a kit and some extra parts and we put them together and made it work. Luckily Tim is very good at technical stuff like this because I'm not. Installing a drip irrigation system actually sounds harder than it is, and you can keep it very simple, or you can install a lot of cut-off valves, for example, that give you the option of watering different beds at different times (instead of watering everything at the same time in the same way) which takes more time, but gives you a lot more versatility since not all plants have the same water needs. You can install timers that turn the system on and off, which is very handy for when a person goes on vacation. The sky is the limit as you can design a system that suits you. Many drip irrigation supply stores (DripWorks is an example of one) will design your drip irrigation system for you if you provide them with a layout of your garden. Many have online programs you can use at their websites to design your own system. You can buy off-the-shelf basic kits at places like Lowe's or Home Depot. There's many different ways to do it. You can make it really simple or really complicated depending on how much you like to fiddle around with technical stuff. I like keeping it as simple as possible. Most of the men I know speak a whole different language when talking about irrigation systems like this and most of what they say flows in one of my ears and out the other ear and I have no idea what they are talking about. I have a brother-in-law and nephew who install irrigation systems in Texas and their technical know-how just boggles my simple mind. I just want to be able to turn on the water system and have water flow out into the garden and I don't get into all the technical details. I don't even want to know the technical details. In our family, that sort of stuff is Tim's job. Don't get me wrong. I greatly admire people who have scientific and technically-oriented minds and can do all the math and figure out different configurations and water flow for different situations and such, but my brain just doesn't work that way. At this link, you can download the Drip Works drip irrigation planner. Dripworks Free Drip Planning Guide If you click on this link, you can see the Drip Works garden planner. It is pretty cool and you can use it free for a week. Once you've planned your garden, you then can plan your drip irrigation system. Drip Works Garden Planner Also on their website there's lots of other info available, including a blog. I read everything I could get my hands on back when I was trying to figure out how to get started with drip irrigation. Most drip irrigation companies have all kinds of info, usually including blogs and how-to videos, on their websites.