Auditing Irrigation

We are a year removed from the irrigation installation and it is time to see how things are working. Monday, Rainbird conducted a audit on the system. We chose the 16th green and fairways for the testing. These are the same areas that were tested in 2008 by Colorado State University Extension from Mesa County. It will be great to see the comparison from old to new.

The old system was 55% efficient on the green and a mere 32% efficient on the fairway.

Wade Vecchio, our local Rainbird representative and Brian Keighan, president of Irrigation Technologies were on hand to perform the audit. The cups are placed every 10 feet on the green and are recorded by GPS. Next, each sprinkler head that waters the green is turned on one at a time to simulate a nightly watering. Each head was turned on for 6 minutes. During their cycles, the main flow from the head is tested for pressure (bottom picture). The desired pressure is 80 psi, which passed with flying colors.

The goal for collecting water in cups is to find the uniformity of the application, not the amount of water applied. Our goal is to be above 80% efficient. The fairways should grade higher because they are wide open spaces and the heads are placed in a perfect triangular pattern. However the wind did pick up slightly during the test for fairways, which will skew the numbers slightly.

Greens are different, because the odd shape of the greens and tighter spaces with trees and various terrain. A poor grade from the audit on greens will require adjusting/replacement of nozzles. Needless to say, I expect much higher grades than the 2008 scores. We are in the right direction, this test will tell us how much tuning we still need to accomplish. Over the next year, we will audit every green in-house to ensure uniformity.