Designing a sprinkler system used to mean a tape measure, graph paper, and a lot of guessing. With the Areaplane Irrigation Planner, you can sketch the whole layout in the browser — heads, zones, drip lines, and a real bill of materials — over a coffee.

This guide walks through the whole process for a typical residential lot. By the end you'll have a printable PDF report you can take to the supply house.

A note before we start. This tool and this guide are for planning and learning. They are not a substitute for a licensed irrigation specialist. Always verify your static pressure, available flow, local code, backflow requirements, and freeze depth before you trench or buy parts.

Step 1: Measure your water supply

Every irrigation system is constrained by two numbers: pressure and flow.

Static pressure (PSI) — what the pipe sits at with no water moving. A cheap gauge at the hose bib gives you this in seconds. Most North American residential systems sit at 40–80 PSI.
Available flow (GPM) — how many gallons per minute you can actually pull. The bucket test is the easiest: open the spigot all the way and time how long it takes to fill a 5-gallon bucket. 300 / seconds = GPM. A 5-gallon bucket that fills in 30 seconds is 10 GPM.

10 GPM is a reasonable default, but measure yours. A system designed for 10 GPM that only has 6 GPM will struggle to cover anything.

Step 2: Upload a floor plan or satellite image

Open the Irrigation Planner and drop in a reference image of your property:

A site plan from your builder
A property survey from your home purchase
A screenshot from Google Maps at the right zoom level

The image just has to be clear enough that you can see lawn edges, the house footprint, and any beds.

Step 3: Calibrate the scale

Click the Settings gear → Set scale. Click two points on a known dimension — a curb panel, a wall segment, a labeled driveway width — and enter the real measurement.

This is the single most important step in the whole workflow. Every radius, every pipe length, every GPM calculation depends on it. If your scale is off by 10 %, your bill of materials is off by 10 %.

Step 4: Outline the turf and obstacles

Use the Grass tool to trace each lawn area. The planner uses these polygons to:

Auto-size each head's radius so the wedge stays inside the polygon.
Suggest sprinkler types based on the largest inscribed circle (small areas → spray; medium → MP rotator; large → rotor).

Anything you don't trace is treated as "do not water" — driveways, walkways, pools, and so on.

Step 5: Place sprinkler heads

The planner gives you four head types in a single Heads dropdown:

Spray (5–18 ft) — Best for narrow strips, beds against walkways, parkways. Higher precipitation rate, short cycles. Use 8 / 10 / 12 / 15 / 18 ft VAN nozzles.
MP Rotator (6–35 ft) — Best for slopes, clay soils, and most residential lawns. Low precip rate (~0.4 in/hr) means no runoff, but each zone has to run 3–4× longer than a rotor zone for the same water depth.
Rotor (8–24 ft) — Best for larger turf areas. Fewer heads, less plumbing, but you need at least 15 ft between heads.
Drip (line) — Best for shrub beds, hedges, and planters. Draw a polyline and the BOM gets 1/4" tubing + Rain Bird ET63-100S point emitters at ~18" spacing.

Head-to-head spacing. The cardinal rule of sprinkler layout: every head's wedge must reach the next head. That's how you get matched precipitation — no dry spots, no over-watered spots. Click a head and drag the rim to size the radius until it touches its neighbor.

Step 6: Group heads into zones

Zones exist because your water supply can only run a few heads at once. Open the Zones panel and create one zone per cluster of heads that share a valve.

A safe rule: keep each zone's total GPM below min(POC GPM × 0.75, 12). The planner colors over-cap zones red so you don't have to do the math.

You can drag heads (and drip lines) between zones in the sidebar — useful for shuffling things around as you balance flow.

Step 7: Lay out the plumbing

Mainline — From your POC (point of connection) to the valve boxes. The planner draws this as a single red polyline and bumps the BOM with 1" Schedule 40 PVC.
Lateral — From each valve to the heads on that zone. Drawn as orange polylines, 3/4" Schedule 40 PVC.
Swing pipe — The last 12–18" of flex pipe from the lateral up to each head's inlet. Two SBE-050 elbows per head (one MNPT × barb at the lateral, one MNPT × barb at the head) plus a length of SP-100.

Drip lines are drawn separately and produce their own tubing + emitter quantities.

Step 8: Export the plan

When you're happy with the layout, click Settings → Export PDF. You get a multi-page report:

Cover — title, summary stats (heads, zones, drip lines, coverage), and a plan-view snapshot.
System overview — scale, turf area, water supply, total demand, plumbing footage.
Per-zone breakdown — each zone with its heads (type, radius, arc, GPM, Rain Bird SKU) and drip lines (length, emitter count, GPM).
Bill of materials — categorized: heads, mainline, lateral, drip, fittings, swing joints, valves and manifolds, valve boxes, control wire, backflow assembly, controller, winterization, and consumables.

You can also export the BOM as a CSV (handy for the supply house) or save the full project as a JSON file you can re-open later.

A few things to verify before you build

The planner gives you a starting point that's surprisingly close to a finished design — but before you trench:

Verify static pressure and flow on-site. A pressure gauge and bucket test take five minutes.
Check local code. Many municipalities require a permit, an inspection, and a specific backflow assembly (PVB, DCVA, or RPZ).
Check frost depth. In cold climates, mainlines need to be buried below the frost line or designed for winter blow-out.
Confirm head spacing on-site. Wind, slope, and obstructions can shift effective coverage by several feet.

The Irrigation Planner is intentionally honest about being a planning tool, not professional design software. Use it to learn, to budget, and to walk into the supply house with a list — then verify everything before you put a shovel in the ground.

Start designing

Open the Irrigation Planner and design your system.

If you want to see the planner in action before you start, the landing page has a live animation of a plan being assembled.