Saving water with your irrigation system in the most effective way

We all know the importance of water conservation and what happens when we are running short. This is a serious problem especially in certain parts of the world which makes preventing water wastage a key component in efficient irrigation of greens. Part of being a grounds keeper or green keeper is assigning your time by splitting it up and designating it to certain greens. Usually this involves approximately 10 minuets per green. In most cases this results in over watering and on the other end of the spectrum it can cause under watering. The difference between the two is that over watering does not become visible quickly to the eye when under watering starts to leave colored patches in the grass.

The problem arises when a controller is working in minuets and it does not control the amount of water being distributed over the surface. In order to find out how much water to distribute over a certain area you can use one of the following ways:

Analyze each zones watered area. Check the type of nozzles that are fitted on the sprinklers. Look inside the manufactures information to try and estimate the flow per hour. Divide the flow by the area to work out the rate of precipitation. This is usually specified in mm p/h.

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Buy yourself some catch cans. Put the catch cans scattered within the sprinklers range (radius). Run the sprinklers for a certain amount of time. When you have completed this then take a record of how much water is in each can. Find the average amount of water and then divide by the watering time in hours (minuets/60). This will give you the precipitation rate. It is good to test this method numerous amounts of times unless you have lots of catch cans.

The biggest advantage is with the second method is that it gives you a very clear indication of how the water is being distributed around a chosen area. Produce a small table for each area for the minuets applied against the mm of water collected. You should then know that 10 minuets on Green 4 is 3mm while 10 minuets on green 11 is 7mm.

After that you need to choose how much water is applied each night. I'm sure you will have come across the term ET as it tends to be called. This is a type of measure of which mm is the unit. It measures the water loss from a plant over 24 hours through evaporation and transpiration. The biggest point is for irrigation to replace only the amount of water lost and no more.