What’s this thing inside my drip irrigation tube? 🤔
this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2025
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That's the emitter. It's a piece of plastic designed to prevent clogs and to impede roots growing into the tube. Drip tubes are more than just hoses with holes punched in them. (Hoses with holes punched in them are called soaker tubes.)
Source: I used to install and service septic tanks.
(I assume this thing is opposite the hole water comes out of. Sometimes emitters look like rigatoni pasta inside a hose, sometimes they look like stapled-on Band-Aids, but they always cover the hole from the inside. I'm assuming yours is the latter. If there's no hole on the other side of that, then I don't know what that is.)
Basically, if a clump of not-water enters the hose from the source, this thing will stop it from trying to squeeze through the hole and instead loop back around to the source or kinda spread out along the entire run.
From the other direction, if a plant sticks its roots in the hole, it'll feel the plastic and try to take root somewhere else. Most plants don't like to work that hard to root into stuff, so basically anything will dissuade them from entering the hole. (There are some exceptions, and those exceptions are total asshole plants who will root through anything anyway, like bricks and shit. You have to nuke those plants back to the source before you even start laying tube.)