This week we have learned a lot about our irrigation. One, we are not getting 37 PSI at our sprinkler heads and two, in order to get 37 PSI at our sprinkler heads we need to crank up the PSI and hertz at the pump and only keep a couple of the stations irrigation lines on. But before I get into how we need to fix it, let me first tell you how we got to this conclusion.

Throughout the summer we have been trying to figure out why our sprinkler heads have not been shooting out as far as they need to be. We had many hypothesis and observations, but never actually knew what our PSI was at our sprinkler heads. So what we decided to do is make a pressure gauge so we could see what we were shooting out of our sprinklers. After testing 10 sprinklers of each row, we concluded that we were only getting 15-20 PSI while operating. That is 17-22 PSI below what we should be at.

But why is this? Well there is a couple reasons why. One from the pump to our sprinkler heads, the water makes eight 90 degree turns till it gets to our sprinkler heads. Second, we condense down from a 6 inch aluminum pipe to a 3 inch aluminum pipe. That alone can loose 3-5 PSI from condensing. This doesn’t also add that each of our lines have 38 sprinkler heads and produce 0.618 GPM per line.

So what do we do? Well first off we need to increase the PSI and hertz at the pump. Second we need to be hogs and turn off some other lines on the station. However, that isn’t realistic in a non-experiment situation, so ideally what we will have to do is increase the PSI and pressure as much as we can and irrigate in two days. Hopefully then we will get the water pressure we need and the results we are hoping for.