I just completed installation of the system. For a total lawn area of about 8,000 to 9,000 square feet, the system consists of 9 rotors divided into 4 zones. The total material cost is approximately $950, about one half of which goes to the flexible PVC pipes. A hefty $460 was spent to buy the 450 ft of pipes.

For the whole project, I probably spent over 10 days of work.
As I mentioned in the previous post, most of my time was spent to "slot" the lawn. Too many rocks were in the ground and it was a pain to get them out.

The yard is hilly and therefore the pipelines have many high and low points. As a result, I used 15 filtered drain valves for draining the pipes. I wonder if this would have resulted in any pressure loss if they do not achieve a 100% seal under pressure. On the other hand, I am still not sure whether these filtered drains would do a thorough job, as Rainbird on-line store discribes them as "reducing potential for freezing damage" but not eliminating it. I live in Connecticut and it gets much colder than Texas. I am thinking whether I should still try to pump out any remaining water in the system with compressed air before winter.

The Rainbird 5000+ series rotors worked just fine. In fact, they appear to be more sturdy and versutile than the 3500 or 32 SA, while costing only slightly more. It may require a somewhat higher water pressure and flowrate for the best performance. If you have plenty of pressure/flowrate and require a longer throw distance (30 ft or more), I think the 5000+ is the way to go. I used 3 of them plus 6 3500 models.

One lesson learned: if you have a hilly yard, do not place a sprinkler head at a location where the foot of a hill meets the flat ground. If you do that, the range of the sprinkler head can be severely limited and the grass around it can be shot down in a radius fashion, creating something like the Crop Circle in England.

One addition that I plan to make: The stripe of lawn below my deck is not covered by any installed sprinkler head. I am going to get a "side strip" sprayer head which is supposed to cover a rectangular area of about 5 ft x 30 ft. Does anybody have experience in this kind of spray head?