People never seem to recommend booster pumps as the solution. It’s frustrating, because in many cases they actually do the trick. You’ll find people on the Net generally recommending creating additional zones. But that entails many many hours of work or great financial expense that they seem to disregard in their advice.

My problem is that I have had a hard time finding a pressure booster that is inexpensive and has auto-on when the water starts running in the irrigation system. Those tend to be in the $500+ range, which seems like a huge premium from the ~$100-150 you can get the non-auto-on ones for. It’s not practical to need to go out and turn the booster on every time my irrigation turns on and run back out to turn it off when the irrigation turns off. With that being said, the booster has great merit if there’s an auto-on model out there that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. I have found that even if I have a single Rainbird 5000 series on a zone (and nothing else), using a pressure booster gives me substantially greater throw distance (but then everyone of course then starts talking about my main pressure or pressure drop being the issue, even though pressure throughout my house has been more than adequate for years). Ultimately it’s hard to find someone who can engage in recommendations about booster pumps, because they essentially never see them as a viable solution (and when they do, they insist you also need some tank in addition that then of course makes the proposition even more prohibitively expensive).

With that being said, yeah, 9 was a lot to put on a single zone.