Well in this short blog, all I have to say is if you have never had irrigation problems of some sort of variation, then you aren’t farming. These past two weeks we have been playing with finding the right amount of PSI to run through our lines and get our sprinklers to work properly. With water flowing down the ditch not being an issue no more, now we need to figure out how to better utilize it. Our pump allows us to set the PSI and move water at that pressure. However, between the pump and our riser heads, the water makes eight 90 degree angles. This is important because it slows down water significantly, especially since we have aluminum pipe running all the way from the pump. What does this all mean you may ask, well in short it means that we lose about 3 to 6 PSI from the pump to the sprinkler heads. So in order to fix it, we need to move our recommended 37 PSI for our sprinklers heads to 40-42 PSI to compensate for the bends and water pressure lost between the pump and the sprinkler risers.

Along with PSI calculation, we had fun working with Mel, Precision Rains pipe expert, and helped him put together old and problematic pipe and make it whole again. We were able to make fifty-dollar pipe into 1,000 after costs for Mel’s labor. The trick though with old pipe is that it tends to split when you go and try to compress pipe inside of it. So instead what we did is we used appropriate amounts of new pipe and spliced it with old pipe and made repairs that way. A good tid-pit that is good to consider that Mel told us, is in order to keep your pipe is good condition and last longer, is in the winter you set the pipe on top of either wood blocks every ten feet or on the pipe trailer to avoid corrosion by soil and weather damage in the off season. Furthermore, it is also good to keep scrap parts and pieces of pipe around, because you never know when it will be useful and you will need a part that you happened to throw out.