Irrigation/ drainage relationship

[Joe Hancock]

Modern irrigation practices and coverage, as well as golfer expectations (they're to blame for everything we in the business do, after all.....) has led to a need for additional drainage, especially on classic courses.

As an example, Franklin Hills recently did an extensive amount of drainage(including some pumps). The results have been very good.

Discuss.


Joe

[Tom_Doak]

Joe:

An old superintendent friend of mine [whom you know] was with me the first time I visited The Valley Club in Santa Barbara.  He listened to the superintendent there [long since moved on] complain about all the drainage problems on the course.

When we were finally alone the first thing he said was "how can you have so many drainage problems in a place where it only rains ten inches a year?" 

[RDecker]

Part of this may be due to the fact that many of the "classic courses" are in the Eastern part of the U.S. and are built on Old, Heavy clay type soils which tend to be hydrophobic at times and hydrophytic at others.  Clays can go from Concrete to pudding and back to Concrete in a matter of days, having the ability to both effectively and strategic irrigate and then drain them is very critical in the modern day maintenance equation.

[Greg Chambers]

Joe,

I don't think it's a matter of having coverage that is too good, as much as it is a matter of the person in charge of said irrigation system not understanding how to properly utilize it that causes the drainage issues.  Although I won't disagree that today's typical new designs are way overdone.

[Peter Pallotta]

Joe - you're a generous fellow, with us and with your colleagues in the golf industry, and very understanding of the practical realities of golf. But you're also a modest fellow, and I think in this case your modesty may be blinding you to some facts, e.g. the fact that the course you once owned and operated and tended to did not sit on anyone's idea of ideal/dry land, and yet you managed (simply and economically) to deal with it in such a way that I don't remember ever hitting from or even walking through a damp/mushy bit of turf during the entire round we played together. In short, you figured out the proper maintenance and drainage 'regime' for your course. Sadly, many others, from my limited experience, simply don't seem to know how to do the same.

Peter

[Jeff_Brauer]

Water - there is always too much of it or too little for good turf.  Maybe there are five seconds a day when it is in perfect balance.  And, we just keep getting more complicated in an effort to extend to maybe a minute a day.

I don't think I have ever seen an irrigation designer change coverage due to low and high areas. They go for perfect spacing and figure the supt. will adjust times.  If they are really sensitive, they will try to group low and high, shady and sunny sprinklers together.  There is little coordination and the ideas of adding water when needing it and removing it when needed are considered two separate things.  Maybe it has to be that way, I don't know.

I have seen more drainage problems in approach areas due to the several part to part sprinklers around the green.  When you had two full circle heads at the front of the green, you sometimes had too much water draining front, depending on how much of the green drained forward, and how much of the surrounds also drained that way.  Now that there are four heads, each part circle, and each usually set at 90 degrees stopping point, where the sprinklers pause a few seconds before turning back (the drill point) approaches often get twice the water than any part of the green when they don't need it and get soggy. 

One easy solution is to set the stop point of the sprinklers at anything other than 90 degrees, so they turn back way out in the rough.

But in general, old drainage dealt with rain, and now, drainage probably needs to deal with more nuisance water, "extra water" put on daily that needs to run somewhere.  We usually need to deal with it from off site sources, like surrounding houses, too.

[Jonathan Mallard]

I don't think I have ever seen an irrigation designer change coverage due to low and high areas. They go for perfect spacing and figure the supt. will adjust times.  If they are really sensitive, they will try to group low and high, shady and sunny sprinklers together.  There is little coordination and the ideas of adding water when needing it and removing it when needed are considered two separate things.  Maybe it has to be that way, I don't know.

Jeff,

How many times has there been a conversation between an irrigation designer and an architect to explain the effect of the concepts you note on the overall playing conditions of the course?

[Jeff_Brauer]

Well, we try to have those all the time.

One I have all the time is to limit piping on the course to enforce every other day watering as the max they can achieve........They won't do it.  And, I can kind of agree with the reason - usually at grow in you need double the capacity, unless the owner clearly understands that grow in will take an extra year.  Then, we do the math on the cost of a 16" mainline and 3000 GPM pump vs. a 2000 GPM pump and 12" main, or whatever it comes out.  Even at the extra $200K, the cost of the second year is usually higher in terms of lost revenues, starting the payback of the loan, etc.

Other discussions center on whether we can use temporary, moveable quick couplers in outer areas.  Again, the labor of such is probably as high as just putting some sprinklers out there, perhaps on manual or lesser control to keep cost down, and then, they still have them.  (and we hope they only turn them on once a week to once a month)  In the end, if you have torn up natives to grade and replant, it ends up you need a sprinkler there (at least in southern climates) and hope they don't get overused.

Now, up north this year, I did talk it over with the superintendent and we went back from triple to double row.  Some of my other MN courses watered pretty wide, but they had sand caps, and the edges came out dry if the sprinklers were too far from the woods line.  Here, the soil was different, and for various reasons, we couldn't clear quite as wide, so we went down on the sprinklers after careful discussion with superintendent and irrigation designer.

The part to part at the greens is always a discussion we have.  And, I try to walk the irrigation designers staking after it is done to make sure it fits the way we envision grass lines, natives, etc. which aren't always obvious to the irrigation crew in the dirt.  As to coverage in main areas, we just don't get far off of perfect spacing and allowance to replace ET every week at least, usually every night (which I strongly disagree with) 

They just get too many complaints from users that they "didn't pipe it big enough" later on.  You might say its easy for the owner to demand more water later on that we tried to limit, or that the supers don't really understand the programming and sometimes over water.  But, the other takeaway is that the architect should probably have more discussions with the super than the irrigation designer.  But then, after construction, we aren't there very often and other factors may creep in, and those discussions forgotten.