Innovative technology that uses ultrasonic sound to clean drip pipes was developed to embrace the efficiencies offered by drip irrigation in order to preserve precious water resources and to get a return on the investment. The technology known as Greendrum technology uses only sound for cleaning and maintenance of drip irrigation pipes. It uses ultrasonic sound in a small body of water to effectively and quickly clean drip irrigation lines and pipes with ease. It is environmentally friendly and does not use any chemicals. Through testing by the Agricultural Research Council–Institute for Agricultural Engineering (ARC‐IAE), results were obtained and analysed that gave some insight into the performance of drip irrigation systems under field conditions and how effective the cleaning process of the Greendrum technology was. There was a tendency that the emission uniformity (EU) and coefficient of variation (CV) as measured in the field of all the dripper types, deteriorated over time. Greendrum dripline cleaning machine results showed that there was a 73% positive change in the CV of the dripper line from a bad CV of 10.6% to an excellent CV of 2.85%. As the drippers could not be cleaned in any other way, the Greendrum ultrasonic sound way was extremely effective and totally restored the drippers. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.