Here's an article I thought was interesting.

Are you familiar with your irrigation system?
By Olivia Bennett
Non-Potable Water Operations Manager
Coachella Valley Water District
(760) 398-2661 extension 3586
obennett@cvwd.org

Of course you are familiar with your golf course’s irrigation system. It’s an important part of your professional responsibilities. But how familiar? There’s familiar and then there’s familiar!
Given the importance of water conservation – with water agencies throughout California asking, or in some cases, mandating – that customers reduce water consumption, familiar is not enough. When homeowners are asked – or told – in some urban areas only to irrigate two or three times a week, they begin looking for scapegoats.
If you read newspapers, peruse web sites or watch the news on television, you know that a relatively small but vocal group of residents easily get upset with being asked to conserve water and pay higher rates, they often begin pointing fingers at golf courses and asking, “What about them?”
They are not familiar with your irrigation system, and probably don’t care. You do not have the luxury of such apathy. Many courses familiar with their irrigation systems can proudly proclaim, “We are doing our part and here is how we are conserving water. Look at how much better we are doing this year compared to last year and check out these plans that cut our water use for the next five years.”
To be genuinely familiar with your course’s irrigation system, here are some of the basics:
 What is the total number of irrigated turf acres?
 What is the surface area of greens, tees, fairways, roughs and irrigation reservoirs?
 Do your goals include meeting any local landscape ordinance requirements?
 Is all that turf necessary? Homeowners taking out their front lawns to save water want to see golf courses reduce the amount of turf, too. Your members and other patrons, however, want/need to know such reductions won’t necessarily affect course playability.
 What is the depth and holding capacity of your on-site irrigation reservoirs? Most are lined with materials that hold water, but inspect liners to ensure they are intact.
 If birds and plants inhabit your lake — or if you are using a silty water source — it may be time to dredge the lakes, to remove sludge from the bottom of the body of water. This helps maintain the designed depth and capacity.


In addition to the above, knowing the quality of your water helps you irrigate your course more effectively and efficiently.
If you are using a nonpotable water source from a water district or other purveyor, for example, you may want to request water quality data from your water district. Otherwise, it is up to you to collect such information from your reservoir or irrigation system.
Water quality samples must be collected using appropriate collection methods from a representative location in the reservoir or from the irrigation system. Samples must be collected in the appropriate containers for the analysis to be performed and preserved as needed by the analytical test method requirements before shipping. They will then need to be redeemed to a laboratory approved to provide the requested analysis within the required hold time for that analysis.
So if you want reliable data, using an old Gatorade bottle or Coke can you found on the course, filling it with water from the side of the lake, then shipping it two weeks later through USPS/UPS to a soils laboratory is a triple bogy.
No matter how you store it, the quality of water changes the longer you have it on hand, especially if it is exposed to the environment in an open lake or other water feature. You will need to determine how consistent your irrigation water quality is and how often you will need to perform tests.
The Big question is…what do you do with the results? Do you file them away with earlier reports, otherwise doing nothing?
Bad idea! Good idea: Using the data to alter your irrigation methods, including the amount of water applied, along with soil amendments and fertilizers when the water quality results change throughout the year.
Speaking of water quality, it may be necessary to leach the soil in order to control soluble salts, even if your irrigation water has only low salinity levels. Knowing the level of salinity will help you to determine how often to leach the salts past the root zone, and if you should do deep, but infrequent watering. As a follow up, it is important to monitor salinity levels in your soils. If things get really bad, you may have to install drain lines to remove the salts from the soil instead of trying to push them through the soil.
In addition to water quality, there are methods and equipment specifically for determining how long and how often to irrigate your course. For instance, it is possible to use ETo from a weather station, soil moisture probes or the visual appearance of the course to determine when, how often and how long to apply water.
Using the ETo from a weather station, whether it is located on your course or is one of the local state maintained weather stations, may be how you determine your irrigation schedule. If you have your own weather station, you can compare its data to that of the local weather station to see how close they are to each other. Either way, it is important that the weather station you are using is calibrated regularly.
Using soil moisture probes can be a very efficient way to set your irrigation schedule. It is also important to know the soil’s permeability, texture, water-holding capacity and the general make up of the soil throughout the course.
It may be necessary to use multiple run times to avoid runoff with certain soil types.
Sprinklers need to be installed and leveled, operated under the appropriate pressure and spaced according to the manufacturer’s recommendations.
Sprinklers and sprinkler components should be maintained to avoid excessive water loss. Half-circles should be discharging at half the rate of full-circle heads. The throw radius of the sprinkler distribution pattern should be measured to ensure that you have head-to-head coverage. For those courses older than five years, it may be time to upgraded the nozzles to new, more uniform models.
By the way, how often do you (Not your crewmembers, you!) check each sprinkler head?
Pumps can be tested for efficiency and capacity. I’ll bet it isn’t up to par, and operating well below the capacity for which it was designed. The static and working pressure of the pump tells you if it is working too hard or if you have a leak or flow restrictions in the system. Check the flow meter in your irrigation system to determine if it matches what the pump is sending out. This tells you whether there is a discrepancy and identifies the true flow. You may not be putting on, what you think you are. Flow meters should be calibrated regularly, too.
Finally, in the past five years, has the course been audited by a Certified Golf Course Irrigation Auditor? If so, have you followed the auditor’s recommendations to improve irrigation efficiency?
Knowing the information above is a good start to becoming familiar with your golf course. You won’t be able to conserve water or become more efficient if you don’t know what you have as a baseline. You also will have difficulty convincing the public that the golf course industry is conserving water.