You've save yourself a labor of pulling 150 feet of hose off a roller to have the nozzle at a distant site; does that mean for the areas of 25, 50, 75, 100 feet from the source you have another hose to water these areas.
One hundred and fifty feet of hose suggests possibly ..well two at least, possibly three sections with coupllings that are alos buried. Do you know where they are in case of leaks and needed repair.

Personally, I don't think the average home owner will take up your idea...pulling hose off where its stored isn't such a difficult chore...and if the family car is near the faucet it lets the person not use any excuse to clean it.

For someone considering going 150 feet, I would consider burying PVC at least 1.5 inches in diameter and preferable 2 inches. Even though your incoming water is 3/4 to 1 inch in diameter, you'll get much better pressure out at the distance by going to larger pipe.

Really? Increasing pipe size from 3/4" pipe to 2" pipe will improve your water pressure at a distance of 150 feet? I didn't know that. I'll have to try that next spring for a project I'll be doing. I'll let you know how it works. Thanks for the info.

Actually no, you wouldn't get increased pressure....the inside of the pipe, being larger, increases the loss due to the water moving over a larger area ( and thus losing pressure. The friction loss through a 2" pipe quadruples the loss through a 1" pipe.
But, I believe the reference to the 2" pipe is to suggest it be used as a conduit to carry the rubber hose and guard against its being harmed, by freezes that would cause it to rupture or upheave, or being run over by the careless homeowner with a lawn mower.
For 150 feet of hose from the tap on a municipal system, the pressure at the end is going to be a lot less than if you were to have it leave at the 100" and less distance.

Fluid mechanics is more complicated than it might seem. goren is mixed up somewhere. Look at it this way: If you used 1/4-inch plastic tubing at 150 feet, you would have no flow at the end. If you had a pipeline that was 6 feet in diameter, you would have all the flow you needed at 150 feet. Bigger pipe results in more flow.

Pressure was the wrong word to use. My bad. Flow is what you're after. In fluid mechanics of pipeline flow you have three elements that affect the flow. There is resistance, capacitance, and inertance. Goren was thinking about resistance I think. Generally you get more resistance to flow by pinching off the flow with a nozzle. You have less resistance to flow if you widen the pipe. Resistance is one factor. Capacitance has to do with the size of the pipe and that ability of that pipe to expand under pressure. Metal pipe has more ability to hold pressure than a rubber balloon. Plastic hose and pipe is somewhere in between. Pipe is probably better at holding the pressure. When you make the pipe bigger it can expand more. When you turn the water on, the larger pipe will help you maintain pressure along the length of a very long pipe. The other element is inertance. That has to do with the ability of an "object" at rest to get moving. If water is at rest in the hose, it will take a bit of time to get moving again. Once it does it flows fine with only the pipe resistance to slow it down.

What really affects the fluid drag is the velocity of the flow. In the drag equation, the velocity factor is squared while the rest are linearly proportional to drag. Thus if you had flow moving at 3 feet per second, the drag would be 9x higher if you doubled the flow velocity. By increasing the diameter of the pipe, you drastically reduce the velocity of flow assuming you have a fixed mass of water moving through it. Your water flow is determined by the pressure and faucet size at one end, nozzle size at the other end (your sprinkler is the nozzle), the length of pipe, and the material/size of the pipe.

When you go from 3/4 inch hose which has a cross sectional area of 0.44 inches, to a 2-inch pipe, which has a cross sectional area of 3.14 inches, the flow velocity drops by a factor of 6. Thus the resistance to flow drops by a factor of 36.

To summarize if you have a large, rigid pipe full of slow moving water, you are going to have all the flow you need. 2 inches might not be big enough for some applications but it should be fine if you are only out to 1,000 feet or so.

As an aside I used to work in a farming area with pivot irrigation systems. Some of those systems use electric pumps but some still rely on gasoline motors. What they do is connect the drive shafts of two V8 engines and use those to drive the water pumps. I figure they get 400-600 horsepower the way they are set up. Here's a picture.
{{gwi:121612}}

I saw this tip in the spring and decided to try it myself. I know a permanent PVC install would be a better option, but this is much easier for the do-it-yourselfer. I had revisited the post today to see if there was any mention of removing the hose for the winter. It appears yours has been in place for 6 years or more now, so I guess I'll leave it there for now! Thanks.

I've had a 150' hose attached to a battery-powered timer (on the faucet) in my "forest garden" for three years now. I drilled 1/8" holes in the hose where I wanted water, fifteen places, total. I buried the hose a little most places, and by now the soil has covered it entirely. Works great.