How to irrigate large lawn

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Wors
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How to irrigate large lawn

Post by Wors » June 5th, 2018, 3:40 pm

My lawn size is 23k. The irrigation setup is mp rotators on 10 zones. To put down 1" of water would take ~20-22 hours. The system overlaps some zones.

Should I change the heads in zones so there is minimal overlap? Then, I could irrigate two nights in a row for 10 hours each night to get 1".

How do others irrigate their larger lawns?

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HoosierLawnGnome
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Re: How to irrigate large lawn

Post by HoosierLawnGnome » June 5th, 2018, 5:00 pm

I have 1.4 acres of a KBG blueberry monostand. I have 14 zones of varying size and coverage from a well pump. There is not enough time in a day to water the entire yard an inch all at once.

I break up my weekly inch deep waterings over 3 nights. The runs start about 3 and end around lunch, and they cycle through all the zones about 4 times rather than all at once. My soil is pretty tight so runoff is an issue, particularly on a front slope. I'm considering breaking it down even further, but the more evenings you have it running over - the more difficult it is to track what area has received what amount of water when it rains. It really is like watering X number of lawns.

You definitely want head to head coverage. I have an area that does not, and there are spots there is no coverage - for instance the spot right in the middle of 4 heads. Once head puts out more water at the radius of the circle than the middle, so you can see a band. With head to head coverage you get double coverage, so if there is one head that misses a spot, the other will pick it up. Two is one, one is none. Much more even and forgiving coverage.

Wors
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Re: How to irrigate large lawn

Post by Wors » June 5th, 2018, 5:53 pm

HoosierLawnGnome wrote:
June 5th, 2018, 5:00 pm
I have 1.4 acres of a KBG blueberry monostand. I have 14 zones of varying size and coverage from a well pump. There is not enough time in a day to water the entire yard an inch all at once.

I break up my weekly inch deep waterings over 3 nights. The runs start about 3 and end around lunch, and they cycle through all the zones about 4 times rather than all at once. My soil is pretty tight so runoff is an issue, particularly on a front slope. I'm considering breaking it down even further, but the more evenings you have it running over - the more difficult it is to track what area has received what amount of water when it rains. It really is like watering X number of lawns.

You definitely want head to head coverage. I have an area that does not, and there are spots there is no coverage - for instance the spot right in the middle of 4 heads. Once head puts out more water at the radius of the circle than the middle, so you can see a band. With head to head coverage you get double coverage, so if there is one head that misses a spot, the other will pick it up. Two is one, one is none. Much more even and forgiving coverage.
That's exactly what I am facing, not enough time in the day. Yeah, I cycle mine twice now but maybe I will take your advice and do 3-4.

I have the coverage but no way to split 5 zones one night and 5 zones the next. One zone whether it is 5/5 or 6/4 will get watered 2 days in a row on the current setup.

So, it sounds like you would break up a zone and treat it like 2 lawns. This would avoid running it back to back nights and having one section of the lawn getting watered 2 nights in row?

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HoosierLawnGnome
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Re: How to irrigate large lawn

Post by HoosierLawnGnome » June 6th, 2018, 4:51 pm

Yeah, sometimes you can't do the ideal and have to do what's best in a given scenario.

I kept my programs close together so I could hopefully turn them all on and off when a rain system moved through.

But, now I'm more concerned about keeping the turf strong and thriving in dry hot weather - that's better at preventing disease :)

Wors
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Re: How to irrigate large lawn

Post by Wors » June 6th, 2018, 8:55 pm

Thanks for the suggestion HLG. Maybe in the fall I will dig up a few sprinklers and move them to avoid the overlap.


rucraz2
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Re: How to irrigate large lawn

Post by rucraz2 » July 10th, 2018, 7:49 pm

Ive been struggling myself to figure out how to run mine on the 1 acre I moved into last fall. I have 16 zones split between two controllers on a shared well. My wife doesn't want them run past 5am for when she gets up to take her shower. Otherwise there isn't enough pressure for that. So I start at 11 every night going with 40 mins per zone on the controller with 9 zones. 50 mins per zone the other night with 7. Someone suggested running my zones longer splitting it up into 4 nights alternating. But my controllers aren't that sophisticated as far as I can figure out.

ctrav
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Re: How to irrigate large lawn

Post by ctrav » August 23rd, 2018, 11:43 pm

We are on 1.25 acres and watering is tough. My front yard has a runoff issue so lots of tweaking on water times. The spray heads you use makes a difference as to how much water is put down and I have a mixture of heads. I have a total of 17 zones split between two RainBird controllers. The great thing about the RB's is that I can control them with my phone (love gadgets).

I made some adjustments based on my last watering experience and the use of two websites for more information. "Water My Yard" and "Water is Awesome". Check those sites out to get some details if they are appropriate for your area. I will continue to monitor for runoff as this is a concern.

New Schedule:

Start Times - 12:15, 2:15, 4:15 and 6:15 am

Water all goes down during the 4 run cycles. Zone run time varies between 3 and 20 min for each zone per cycle.

This is so fun....until my wife see's the water bill!

ctrav
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Re: How to irrigate large lawn

Post by ctrav » August 23rd, 2018, 11:49 pm

Forgot to mention another thing I did was split my lawn care duties into two days. We are on water restrictions so I can only water on Wed and Sat. So I cut the front on Tue and hit each zone for 10 min just to get some water on it. Then the deep water cycles start just past midnight. Then on Friday I do the same for the back40. This actually allows me to give a little more detail to the front or back as needed and most important it allows me to deep water once a week!

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Dchall_San_Antonio
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Re: How to irrigate large lawn

Post by Dchall_San_Antonio » January 8th, 2019, 3:11 pm

I used to have about that much lawn to water at the edge of the Texas desert. Fortunately I had about 10,000 sq ft under trees which slowed the evaporation. I also was allowed, to a point, to grow the St Augustine grass much higher than most people find reasonable. At the highest it was 32 inches tall. That grass never needed watering. The super deep roots were able to grab water between our infrequent rain events. Toward the end of my stay at that house I had to mow down lower. I managed to keep it at 12 inches without getting my hands slapped by the city. Still at 12 inches it rarely looked wilty enough to need watering. So between the trees and the tall grass, my watering requirements were minimized. For those spots in the full sun, I used long hoses and oscillating sprinklers. I had at least two hoses going every night. The oscillators took 8 hours to apply 1 inch. I never quite got to 8 hours, but 5 to 6 hours was plenty go to from week to week during the dry spells. No spot was watered more than once per week and most were watered more like 1/2 inch every 10 days or so.

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