Sprinkler Head Installation

 

The last section of mainline installation was through #1 tee and down 18 fairway.

The final step of the mainline installation was the flushing of the line in order to get out any unwanted debris.  Here's a video of the final flush.

With the mainline finished it was finally time to start installing sprinklers.  We started on the far south end of the property since that was the easiest way to cut off the old system's water and power as we worked back to the north end where the power and water originates.  The first step in pulling laterals is to dig a hole at each point where a sprinkler head is to go.  

 

After that the lateral pipe is pulled at a depth of 18" through several of these holes using a vertical plow.  Check out this video of the process.

More often than we would like, the plow catches a pipe from the old system and instead of cutting through it, the blade just hooks it, and the old pipe starts to get pulled into the new plow line which causes all kinds of ugly surface disruption. 

The crew stops plowing when this happens and then they dig down to cut the old pipe and free up the plow blade. 

With the pipe now pulled into place, the team goes back to each hole that they had previously dug, and they install the sprinklers.  Here's a picture from the first day of this process where the team is getting a lesson on how this is done.  

Most of the team members have installed countless sprinkler heads on previous projects, but for some of them this is the first time.   

Each sprinkler head has a solenoid that is equipped with a unique address denoted by a series of numbers or letters.

At the end of each day I'm given a sheet which shows all the new addresses that I need to add into the computer.  Some days this can be as many as 60+ new spinkler heads, or addresses that need to be inputed into the software.

When you get everything inputed and the computer acknwledges each individual address or sprinkler, then you can immediately start watering.  Here's a picture of some of the first sprinklers that we got running on the new system.  It was a sight to behold.