I think the hose is the least of the mistakes you are making. Since the hose is connected to a sprinkler, the actual pressure in the hose isn't that great, so I wouldn't worry too much about a rupture. Here's what I would worry about. You overseeded your lawn in early June, which is the worst time to start a lawn, probably even worse to overseed. The best time is in late summer/early fall (for cool season grass, which I assume you are doing). The chances of the new grass making it through the summer are very small. Also you are providing excellent conditions for weeds to flourish. Mistake number two. You are watering for an hour, once per day. Where to start with this one...with overseeding you want to water for 5-10 minutes three times a day to keep the new seeds moist, not soaked. You are overwatering even for an established lawn. Hopefully you are watering before sunrise. If you are watering in the afternoon you are inviting fungal diseases to flourish as your lawn will be continually wet. You can expect any number of the patch diseases to take hold unless you have ideal temperature conditions (70's during the day, 50's at night). Even then you can still get fungal outbreaks, especially on the new grass. Now if you have bare spots, then that one hour of watering has a good chance of washing the seeds into one area, especially if your lawn has some slope to it. The deck is really stacked against your overseed, you might get some grass to grow, that might make it, but don't get your hopes up to high.

Ugh. Thanks for the advice -- when I come in on Thursday I'll fix it ASAP. Actually I'm watering in the early morning, when it rarely breaks 70 degrees.

The hose is connected to the timer, not the sprinkler, by the way.

How big are the patches? Have you thought about just sodding the areas? Scrape out a little dirt from the bare patch, place sod, water heavily, and it should be fine until you come back next week (unless you're doing this in July / August).

Is the timer connected to the spigot at the house? If so then there is no pressure on the hose when the water is off. Obviously whenever the timer is on the water is flowing through the hose out the sprinkler. The pressure in the hose at that point is pretty low. Once the timer shuts off the valve in the timer is taking the pressure, not the hose. If the timer is part of the sprinkler at the end of the hose then there will be a lot of pressure on the hose.

What I did was to run the 150 foot hose that I described to the timer, and then turn the water all the way. Then from the timer it goes to the sprinkler. So I would think there would be considerable pressure. However, I tried it overnight and it looked good, no leaks or anything.

I was thinking maybe I should get a heavier line and run it to the timer next time.

As for the suggestion on sod: actually some of the patches are a bit large, and covered with what looks like dead grass/thatch. However, raked it out and I Think the seeds came into contact with the ground.

I'm thinking of using Scotts Patchmaster, which I have left over from a couple of years ago, when I first got the house and had a little bare-batch trouble. Since then I've mostly found that the bare batches sort of solve themselves.

Hey i would follow the guys advise here it's invaluable. Leave until fall, then go to home depot/Lesco and get some lesco 1-2-3 patch if you can find it, i did it last year and it was awesome, scotts patch is ok too, used that one 2-3 years ago and the bare patches filled in fine no problems. then next spring just fight the weeds and by next fall it should be decent. Good luck.

I actually took care of another bald patch in the fall by overseeding and letting the snow work its way in. I went to a lot of trouble, using a lot of seed and even putting in new soil. Unfortunately, I didn't tell the snow plow guy, and he plowed away all my great work!

So I bought a timer and two sprinklers (one defective, naturally), and was hoping to attack my bare patches over the summer. One of my neighbors says that he uses "contractors blend," which he says works well, but the lady from Cornell Extension Service said fescue is just as good if not better.

Sure would love to use that timer and sprinklers, if it won't screw everything up.

I think your setup is risky. I had a failure with a similar setup once.

Normally you would connect the timer to the spigot and then connect the hose between the timer and the sprinkler.

In my case, the timer instructions said to eliminate water hammer (which was a problem with this timer) by placing a short piece of hose between the timer and the spigot. Well, it ruptured one day, but luckily it happened when I was at home.

I have also had a timer failure once. And, of course, it failed in the "off" direction rather than the "on" direction. So I came home after work one day to see that the sprinkler had been running for about eight hours.

If I'm leaving on vacation or something, I always alert a neighbor to watch for unusual behavior from the sprinkler timers and to just shut off the water if there's anything going wrong.

Yeah, well I am coming to that conclusion myself.

Yeah, you need to have the timer connected to the spigot, that way there is no pressure in the hose when it is off. Don't waste your money buying patchmaster or ez seed. There are so many reasons why that stuff is a total waste of time and money. Do a search on this forum for "patch" or "ez seed" and read through some of those threads.

I had a neighbor turn off the spigot. Got away lucky this time, as there was no rupture.

The timer actually has two outlets, and I was going to attach two sprinklers two them but one turned out to be defective. It was a yellow rotary sprinkler from Vigoro, I think. The water came out but it wouldn't revolve. Back it goes to Home Depot.

Just a postscript: I guess I was lucky, as there was no rupture and there was actually some grass taking root. As a matter of fact, one of the patches that I overseeded actually has a nice growth of grass now.

I have some other bare patches that I've filled with some Vigoro patch filler that I just discovered I had, and as someone suggested I'm watering every 8 hrs for ten minutes. We'll see how it goes.