Hi, Have any of you ever taken a fully loaded 10 wheeler (or similar) on a lawn with irrigation? It has to cross a few spots where there is PE pipe buried underground. I was planning to put down 3/4 plywood to distribute the weight better. Just want to avoid crushing / smushing the pipe, which seems to be buried at a pretty good depth. Thanks,
I would throw down some plywood, when we did irrigation years ago it was always 1" pipe, the hard pipe you could just about deform by standing on it. We always buried it 10" deep, although I've seen it as shallow as 6".
Welcome to the Forums aerodan1!:drinkup Take all the precautions you have like movindirt suggested but exclude any damages and subsequent repair of irrigation lines before you step foot on the job. If you didn't install the irrigation, you have no idea what's underground nor how it was constructed. Back to the question, yes I have taken tandems across lawns with irrigation and had no issues but I had an exclusion in the contract/agreement before we started.
In my experience, if a lawn has irrigation, it's going to be wet enough that a loaded truck will put ruts in the grass that'll need repaired as well.
In a former lifetime I would deliver a load of sand to a residence now and then. Never crossed the curb line without a freshly signed waiver of liability, with a transfer you KNEW there would be damage, people just don't have a clue. 3/4" marine plywood was what we used and in most cases it held up fine. YMMV
Thank you for the welcome, the forums here are great! I put in the irrigation myself, most of the pipes are as deep as the ditch witch would set them using 3/4" HDPE pipe rated for 125 psi, I'll definitely be avoiding the shallow spots. Thanks for sharing your experience and the helpful pointers.
Thank you for the input. I'm mostly out of the business these days - this is actually for my house, but I never had a signed waiver when taking the dump trucks off road at someone's house. Nothing bad ever happened so I guess luck was on my side, but I have always been very careful as well. I agree some of the places people want you to go with a truck are a bad idea, whether for them or you. My favorite was always "but I just had another truck in that same spot just recently, why won't you dump there?". A lot can go wrong pretty quickly if you aren't looking out for the truck first and foremost.
Waiting for a couple dry days in a row, irrigation has been turned off for now. Hoping the plywood will help distribute the weight enough to avoid any ruts.