Choices

If you have been an irrigation contractor for more years than you would like to admit, you can remember the days when installing irrigation systems was simpler. You didn’t have many choices – you installed a spray sprinkler or a rotary sprinkler to properly irrigate an area. You may have on occasion branched out to a stream spray or even a bubbler. It didn’t matter much whose equipment you used because a spray head was a spray head and a rotor a rotor. Ah, the simpler life.

Today’s irrigation systems are a bit more sophisticated. Whether dictated by water conservation, regulation or client wishes, there are now choices, and lots of them. In today’s irrigation world you need to sift through the myriad choices available to you and come up with an irrigation system best suited for the landscape, the client and for your business.

This requires effort, not just installing what the local distributor representative wants to sell you. It takes educating yourself, looking at the various features of the products and their performance. It might require learning more about uniformity and efficiency so you can compare one sprinkler to another and it could involve learning – or relearning – about precipitation rates so you can better utilize the water window available to you or change your programming habits.

To see how new technologies have provided abundant choices you only need to look at the spray sprinkler, both the body and nozzle. Although two separate pieces together they provide the means to apply water to what are considered short radius areas, 0 to about 25 feet. The body has a few options, pressure regulating or non-pressure regulating, check valve in the bottom or not, pop up height (minimally 2-, 4-, 6- or 12-inch) and flow stop or not. Most spray sprinklers are designed to operate at 30 psi. However, the majority operate at much higher pressures. Using a pressure regulating spray sprinkler will cost more, but will operate all of the sprinklers at approximately 30 psi, which provides the indicated precipitation rate, the specified distance and proper uniformity.