Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

We purchased a total of three of these sprinklers a few months ago to use in our irregularly-shaped yard. First, the good: the sprinkler is incredibly customizable. You can really target the spray pattern to cover smaller or larger areas, and even make somewhat irregular shapes. We tried a number of sprinklers and this was the only one that worked for our yard. We liked the first one so much we bought two more. It also sprays well and evenly, and can be daisy-chained well. Now, the bad: we used them last fall, put them away for the winter and just took them back out. Two of the three have sprung large leaks from the center body -- see the included image -- almost all of the water is leaking out the center rather than coming out of the nozzles. Two out of three is a ridiculous failure rate for such an expensive sprinkler! We contacted Gardena for warranty service, and it's been a disaster. First, they have no US office -- their Canada office covers both the US and Canada. They are open very limited hours, but do have a web form to submit issues. Unfortunately, the web form seems to just go into a black hole -- there's no confirmation that you sent anything, and they don't respond. We called their office during the limited hours they're open -- you can only leave a message for their service department who calls back a few days later. The woman who called back tried to be somewhat helpful. She wants us to ship the (heavy) sprinklers, at our expense, to an inspection office in Michigan and then they'll consider shipping replacements from Canada in 2-3 weeks. They refused to pay for return shipping and said that's just how their warranty works -- the customer is on the hook for shipping, even when the product is defective. Since we had just reseeded our lawn, we had no choice but to buy replacement sprinklers instead. Reasonable customer service would have been to ship us replacement heads and cover return shipping for the defective heads. I'm sorry to say that I can't recommend this sprinkler -- it's too bad, because it's really useful -- it just doesn't last and costs too much to replace every year!