Time to check your irrigation system and elimnate the dry, brown spots in your lawn.
With spring nearly gone and the temperatures rising, the water demands for your garden, lawn and landscaping will also increase. In today’s blog we’ll explore the basic checks as you start your irrigation system.
These checks are usually best done on a warm day when you don’t mind getting wet! First, check any screen filters that supply water to the irrigation system. Next, turn on your irrigation controller and start a manual cycle that will turn each of your watering zones on.
Check to see that each sprinkler, or drip hose has water flowing. Check that they are putting water where the water needs to go and it isn’t just running off onto sidewalks, roads and driveways. Put empty containers under several of the drippers and see if they are all delivering equal amounts of water or if they are plugged and need to be replaced. Also check to ensure that the sprinklers are spraying far enough to overlap the nearby sprinkler and that each sprinkler head is putting out a similar amount of water. If some lawn sprinklers are putting out lots of water and others almost nothing, some places will be under-watered and turn brown and some places will be over-watered and turn mushy and green. Sometimes the nozzles on the sprinklers are plugged with minerals and need to be cleaned or replaced. Sometimes, those nozzles were replaced with the wrong nozzle and this can lead to other problems.
If you’re struggling to make your controller run properly, it may be time to upgrade your irrigation controller to something like a Hunter smart irrigation controller that checks weather and adjusts watering to save and optimize your water use! Hunter makes a great product that you can check with your smartphone or computer and even monitor how much water each zone is using, the weather and other vital irrigation information.
The solution to the dead brown spots in your yard.
Many people think that if they are having problems with dry or dead spots in the lawn they need to simply increase the watering time or put larger sprinklers/sprinkler nozzles in. In some cases sprinkler heads or nozzles are replaced and the person replacing them automatically thinks “bigger Is better.” Before you start purchasing larger sprinklers or increasing the watering time, keep reading this article for a solution that is counter intuitive and often more cost effective and water efficient.
Bigger really isn’t always better when it comes to sprinkler heads and may actually be the CAUSE of your problem in the first place. If you have a zone with multiple sprinklers, perhaps some have 2 gpm (gallon per minute) sprinkler heads and some of them were repaired or replaced with 5 gpm sprinkler heads. In this situation you WILL likely have several problems! You’ll have lush green soft overwatered spots around the 5 gpm sprinkler heads and lots of dead/brown around the rest of the yard. This happens because the piping/irrigation valve that was installed underground was selected for the 2 gpm sprinkler heads. With the addition of the 5 GPM sprinklers the water required to operate these sprinkler heads is now much higher. The irrigation valve and pipe may be too small/restrictive to supply the correct amount of flow and pressure required for all of the sprinkler heads to work properly. To correct this problem, remove the 5 gpm sprinkler heads/nozzles and reinstall the proper 2 gpm units!
Irrigated pasture with dry spots resulting from oversized sprinkler nozzles.
Irrigation pasture after careful system review, corrected irrigation nozzles and updated/correctly sized pumping equipment installed.
We have worked with several clients that had brown places in their lawns/irrigated pastures and their landscapers had tried to eliminate these problems spots by watering longer and putting in higher flow sprinkler heads! In some cases the pumps were working harder than ever to keep up with demand, but the dead/brown spots prevailed or even got worse, even though more water was being applied! It wasn’t until our OPS technicians ran each irrigation station and noticed that sprinklers installed could never be supplied by the existing pump system. In these situations, the water often looks good for a few minutes and then the pressure and flow drop off and the water just dribbles out of the sprinklers and doesn’t go more than a few feet because the pressure and flow are inadequate for the sprinklers. The initial great flow and pressure were likely due to the pressure tank reserve of water and/or the higher water table in the well. Both of these help boost water flow, but when they empty/drop all you have is what the pump can move and it may be inadequate.
The pumps that provide water and the pipes that transport it have physical limitations and it is very important to know what these limitations are when you are setting up irrigation stations! For example, if your well pump can provide 15 gallons per minute, then any given irrigation station should be sized for no more than 8-10 GPM to ensure that water is still available for the house and other demands even when the irrgation system is running.
In the case of our clients, we help them install the proper nozzles in their sprinklers, make a few tweaks on the pumps and watering schedule and good results are typically achieved. With the smaller nozzles in place the pump and piping could keep up with demand, the system pressure is normal (40-60 psi) and the nozzles work as designed, giving great coverage of the pasture/lawn!
“Can’t you just put a bigger pump in or fix the pump? The pump is the problem isn’t it?” Are the question that we frequently encounter. While these are potential solutions, they are not always the best solutions. They don’t address the unequal watering from randomly sized sprinklers. It is often very costly, on the order of several thousand dollars, to replace a pump and many of our customers don’t want to shell out that kind of cash. In many cases, more water is not always available from the well and a bigger pump does not suddenly create more water in the well!
If you live in the Napa Valley and need the expert’s touch to improve your water system or watering methodology, contact our highly experienced and qualified team at Oakville Pump Service today! We aren’t out to sell you more or bigger, just solve the challenges in the most efficient way possible.
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