Ask The Droughtbusters: July 1999

Droughtbusters is a question and answer column provided as a service to the landscape industry by the Irrigation Association and Lawn & Landscape Magazine. Please e-mail your questions to irricom1@earthlink.net. Your are also invited to visit the Irrigation Association’s website, www.irrigation.org or use its search engine, www.irri-gate.com.

Q. As an irrigation contractor, I really don’t want to carry a laptop computer around to do irrigation audits. Are audits really so complicated to require a computer?

A. The best irrigation audits utilize software and hardware to perform calculations and print out reports to present to clients. However, a rudimentary audit is better than no audit at all.

An irrigation audit will reveal problems with uniformity and provide you with the application rate of water so you can figure runtimes more precisely. Poor uniformity results in dry spots that property owners try to cover up by increasing runtimes. This is the second worst cause of water waste in landscape irrigation. (The first is not adjusting runtimes to seasonal changes in evapotranspiration.)

A simple, yet effective audit starts with a pad of graph paper, straight-sided containers to collect water, and a calculator.

Draw a map of each zone being tested on a separate piece of graph paper. Use a scale that makes sense, such as 4 feet per square on the paper. Mark the location of each sprinkler. Place the collectors in a square pattern in the zone that also fits the layout on your paper.

Activate the zone for 15 minutes and be exact. When finished, measure the depth of water in each collection can and write it next to the can’s location on the graph paper.

Back at the office, do the math one zone at a time. Compare the amount of water measured in the containers to each other. Are some numbers significantly different? If they are relatively close to each other, uniformity is where it should be. If they are very similar, you can multiply the most common depth by four to find out the application rate of the zone per hour. A ballpark evapotranspiration rate for turf in full sun is 1 inch per week during the hottest part of summer.

If there are lower and higher depth readings from the containers, you need to do more to calculate uniformity.

Count number of containers you used for the particular zone. Next, add up the depth of water you recorded for all the containers. For example, 12 containers with roughly a ½ inch of water each would total 6 inches. Divide the total by the number of containers to get an average per container.

Next, divide the total number of containers you used in the particular zone by four. If you have 12 collectors, the answer is three. Look at all the data on the page of graph paper and find three cans with the lowest depth of water in them. Total the depth of water in these three and divide by three to get the average of the lowest quarter of containers.

Now you have an average for all of the containers and an average for the three lowest containers. Divide the average of the lowest quarter of containers by the average of all of the containers. The answer is your distribution uniformity.

You can see that if a lawn needs 1 inch of water per week in the summer and your distribution uniformity is 65 percent, you might have to extend runtimes as much as a 35 percent. Most of the turf doesn’t need the over-application, so most of the extra water applied is wasted. It is not uncommon to find systems that appear fine, yet are wasting 30 to 50 percent of the water applied.

Eyeballing a lawn to measure uniformity is not sufficient. Some day you will want to have a computer to run tests on the spot. In the meantime, at least start carrying a pad of graph paper and some empty cans.

Bruce Shank is the owner of IrriCOM, a communications firm specializing in irrigation, turf and landscape based in Palmdale, Calif.

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