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NESFMA – Irrigation Tips from STMA Presentation
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New England Blade – Ben Polimer, NESTMA President
Turf Zone: Welcome to the New England Sports Turf Managers Association’s February Turf Zone podcast. In this episode, we welcome back NESTMA President Ben Polimer. Ben will share with us some practical Irrigation tips, as presented at STMA’s national conference in Phoenix.
Ben Polimer: Thank you for having me again, and thank you all for tuning into our second podcast of 2019. This is a snippet of the presentation we did at STMA a couple weeks ago in January. I want to talk to everyone about the project that we did here in Weston in the summer of 2017. When I started here in Weston about three years ago, we had lots of irrigation controllers around town and really no way to control them beyond walking to each site, opening up the cabinet and changing the time – whether it’s longer or shorter, or it going to rain. One of my projects that I did every Friday, before the weekend, was go to 12 or 13 controllers throughout town and change them based on the forecast for the weekend. So that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to us.
We decided to embark on a project to install smart irrigation. Smart irrigation controllers have come a long way in about the 10 years they’ve been around. We put the project out to bid here in Weston. We had a great contractor from Massachusetts, Smart Water Management, who was the contractor for our project. We will just move through what we did here.
Summer of 2017, we had 12 controllers installed. They have flow sensors, master valves, rain/freeze sensors, external antennas for communications, blow out snap valves, 2-system pumps, one solar charging system for our soccer complex. We eliminated one controller, which was nice, we were able to pull wires to a controller that was fairly close to an existing controller. We were able to reduce the amount of equipment, which was great because that certainly reduced the cost of the project.
When we embarked on this project, we had an open-bid process according to the Massachusetts regulations. We encouraged the bidders to walk through the site to get some understanding. So contract costs, you see here the base bid was about $59,000, we had a pump alternate, which was $13,000 to install 2 pumps (that’s the pump, plumbing and the associated electrical). Our change order was just under $4000. So the total project cost was about $76,000. I think we got a lot of value for our money with the project.
You can see this is an example of what we did. You can see the snap valve on the main line, there’s a master valve there. There’s a space between the master valve and the flow sensor. We’re connecting the system back up and ready to go for that night to water. So again, 12 controllers. We did seven sports turf fields, one sports turf field is connected with our Town pool’s lawns, so that was our project. One lawn and landscape area at our community center, one lawn and landscape at our high school courtyard, one lawn and landscape area at the police station in town and one landscape only at the Department of Public Works. Their building has a landscaped area that was irrigated.
This past year, in 2018, we added a large sports turf field and lawn system at one of our elementary schools that’s only about four years old. We installed another system integrated into our current system. That was also a decoder and two-wire system. That was a good project a year after we did this project.
A little bit about the change order. Number one, when we started doing this project, we thought it was a great idea to add some quick couplers, blow-out areas, to the large systems that would help us with winterization. That was $875. Something we didn’t add in the base bid, which, looking back, we should have, was a wireless rain-free sensor. Those are $1,650 for all the sensors. They were really an important thing looking back.
The external antennas which is really, really important. Here in Weston we don’t have great cell phone coverage. And all these controllers rely on cellular communication. Anything we could do to help that cell network and communication, the better. Basically all of our controllers are located either in a log cabin or inside of a building and they need to have good communication, so we have an external antenna that is outside the building. So again, that total cost was just under $4,000.
Doing this project with Smart Water Management, for him going forward, a lot of the things we learn on our project is now – when he specifies a project for a community, a high school, whoever it is, college/university – he now recommends these wireless rain-free sensors and external antennas. They’re really short money for the amount of resource you get.
Here’s two pictures side-by-side. This is Smart Water, they were installing a solar system on our soccer complex. The soccer complex is a 12-, 13- zone system. Had a DC latch and solenoids, we wanted to change those out to AC latch and solenoids with regular AC current. So we did that, installed the usual setup with controllers, rain sensors, flow sensor master valve, all that stuff. We put in that nice stainless steel cabinet you see. We were able to convert the solar with electricity into an inverter, large batteries, and then in turn power that controller. The original controller there was just a nine-volt battery-operated controller. This is a really good project. Learning about the solar stuff was really good. A good experience for both us as the end-user and for the contractor as well.
Here’s a side-by-side at our baseball complex on the north side of town in Weston. The original was two controllers, a mass of wires. We were able to go from two controllers to one, 48 stations all nice, clean and neat. And again that has the full system setup – master valve, flow sensors, external antenna. Reducing the amount of equipment we have was a good part of that project.
This picture again, side-by-side, working on our high school baseball field. If you see behind the bucket of the excavator, you can see the stainless steel box that happens to be the water main that comes into the entire complex. Not the best place for a water main, behind first base. It’s kind of in play all the time, but the baseball field has been there for a long time and the water system even longer. So we had the excavator, you can see there’s a three inch main line that came out, PVC, and when we’re getting to be that big and that deep, it was easier for the contractor to have a mini-excavator on-site to do that installation. So we did that and digging was definitely the awful. This was in the last week of August so we wanted to do this as quick as possible, so we were lucky we had some good weather when we started this installation and the contractor. We were barely ever down a day, we were lucky.
Here’s one of the pumps that we installed. This is and inline pump. You can see on the left the blue is a backflow preventer, we went off the backflow preventer and caught the piping into the pump. The pump system was wired up and then copper out. This is the boiler valve there, that’s a good place that we can drain that pipe, and that went out to our main line. The pumps are fantastic, very quiet, they work really well with the system. With the pump system we are now able to reduce our watering timing. Reducing water times has been really good for us. We can reduce the amount of leaf wetness we have on the turf. We’ve been able to schedule watering now, really precise and instead of having maybe an eight, nine hour time period where we were watering, not we’ve basically cut that in almost half because of the flow. We are now optimizing our watering, which is a really nice part of this project.
Seeing that copper piping – that was all done with that pro-press system. If you’ve never seen a pro-press system, it’s really quite an interesting process. No soldering is necessary, it just clamps the fittings together. It’s a really quick process and we probably had this pump installed in less than a morning. It was really interesting how they installed that. It was my first experience with using those pressed-in fittings for copper pipe.
When we had this big presentation at STMA, I went through a lot of the process specifications. We won’t go into that here, but one of the important things that I think everyone should do if they’re doing a project like this is have an as-built map. You can see this is four athletic fields on this site, this is at my middle school, you can see the red numbers to 28 are the zones. There are 28 zones on this specific controller. Then we have some of the symbols there FS is the flow sensor, master valve, green is the rain sensor. That sensor is actually sitting on the building, so it’s away from the controller. The controller there, and we also have a winterization connection in the area. As-built maps are really important. We want to know where everything is, where everything was installed. I might not be here in Weston forever, so the next person coming into the position will have maps available to know what’s going on. Again, it’s important to have these as-built maps and when you’re doing the bidding process, schedule of values, you want to put some real money towards what the as-built costs. You want to contractor to obviously fulfill his contract, but you really want them to take pride in giving you that map so you know where everything is for the future.
With those as-builts, I asked for both a 3-ring binder and a digital version. Here’s kind of a snapshot of what I asked for. So we have location, controller location, flowmeter location, master valve/flow size, rain sensor location, if those have a pump, the serial numbers of the model and the serial number of the pump. Again, really good and important if someone wasn’t here or something happens, we have that ability. The head groundskeeper has that 3-ring binder available, I have one at my desk that’s available, but also a digital version. I’m fortunate here in Weston, we carry iPads around with us, and the iPad has all this information readily available. When we are out in the field, I have all this information. It’s very important to have this as a digital version, .pdf is really fantastic. I really recommend having the binder and digital version. Again, you could use it via iPad, you could read it on an iPhone or any type of smart phone.
Here are some of those pictures with the as-built that we have, the police station setup, you can see the backflow preventer on the wall, the controller there, with electricity, the two valve boxes there, master valve and flow sensor. The public works one is below that, pretty much the same setup for irrigation. Again, to the layman, here’s a picture of the unit and if anything was to happen, we know exactly where that unit is.
How do we use our system? When we did this installation, how do we use it now? I had some experience with central controllers before this project. With my previous employer, I did a smart controller set up back in 2009/2010, kind of the beginning of the smart controller revolution, if you will. From everyone’s thoughts on this, that’s really not typical that people have a background or know what central control is. So I was fortunate to have that experience.
Weather-based irrigation of landscape areas, not sports turf. Our system will allow us to irrigate based on weather data, based on ET, based on the weather that we intake through the system. I haven’t done enough sports turf yet. Sports turf is definitely a little more fickle, so we only do our landscape and lawn areas at this point. We’ve only had the system installed, I only have one good year of data. It’s a good possibility this year that we’ll do one sports turf field with weather-based data only and see where we are at that point.
Central control for one click shut off – that’s really fantastic. I can be sitting on my couch at home and we get rain or a thunderstorm to come through and I can log in and shut off all 13 controllers through one click, which is really nice. That’s an instant savings to us. Here in Weston, we pay for every drop of water through NWRA, so that’s a real cost-savings, and I can show that cost-savings when we water. Like we talked about before, with the watering window, that’s now reduced 6-7 hours with multiple zones running. Before we were running basically all night, now we can reduce that watering window. These systems, you can set the gallons per minute and it will come up with a combination of multiple zones to run to come up with that formula. So you’re using the system to its capacity, to its fullest extent. That’s using that watering window efficiently. We use municipal water so I can give town officials up to the minute water usage info. This system gives me a report card every day of what I did the night previous. I have that in .pdf form, it comes to my email address every day at 6:30 in the morning. When there’s questions, I have that information readily available to give town officials. Did we use a lot of water last night, did we use a little? And also with that report I get daily, what happened? Did something go right, did something go wrong? Then especially if something goes wrong, I can direct either my staff or contractor to fix the issue that happened the previous night.
No more driving around town changing controllers on Fridays or the weekends. I can set it up, I can be anywhere in the world and change the watering schedule for all our different controllers, which is certainly makes a lot of sense. The rain-free sensors, they work. They’ve been really good. I think the technology’s gotten better than the older systems. One cautionary thing is they have a freeze-sensing ability now and when you use that freeze-sensing, for us in sports turf, getting into the later part of the year and you have frost in the morning and you want to burn that frost off by running the irrigation, you’ve got to be really aware of what that set point is for the freeze sensor. You might have it up too high – it might be 37, 38 and that might be too high. And if that’s too high, it won’t water – it says it’s too cold, so you definitely want to change that and make sure it’s correct so you can have that sensor work correctly.
No more stuck valves. When I did this presentation, before the presentation, I gave a lot of pictures about stuck valves about stuck valves we have here in town. The valve will be stuck open all night and we were using 10,000 gallons of water just on that field. You come in in the morning and the field’s flooded. We don’t have that anymore with this system. This system understands what the flow should be. When the flow is too high, it will shut off, if it’s too low it will shut off which is really a good public perception thing, that people don’t drive by and see a flooded field or see water running all the time. The system is really, really smart and understands how to use the system via flow.
The last item there, since I don’t have enough data yet, 1+ years, to say if we’ve saved any water. I really only have one good year of data so far with this being installed. In talking with people when I did my presentation in Phoenix, a lot of them were saying that they think you need 5+ years of data to really see what’s going on. One gentleman said you might even need 10 years of data, and I laughed and said that in 10 years, the technology might be totally different and we might be changing the systems again. But anecdotally do I believe we’re saving water? Yes, I do. We are not watering when we don’t need to with that instant shut off, we can be really precise on what we’re doing for watering. So stay tuned on that – are we watering enough? We’ve been using less water.
So what are we doing this year? Here in Weston, we’re going to add some remote quick-connect/disconnects to each of the strong boxes. That’s for our remote system. I have a nive remote that we use. It is much quicker than doing it on your smart phone or an iPhone. You are connected right in rather than going through the network. That will certainly be easier when we do our spring start up and check heads and valves and whatnot. So adding those quick connects will be much easier for us. Right now we’re in design, we’re going in to bid very shortly on some irrigation installation around our new synthetic fields. We did some landscaping, lawns, our JV football field is actually behind that. That’s a brand new field, so we’ll be irrigating that as well. That’s 26 zones right now, that’s currently designed. We’ll add some drip irrigation for some landscape beds, some small sprays for the lawns, some large rotors for the JV football field, and that will be also a two-wire decoder system with a central control. And we’ll be up to 15 controllers in town, so we’ve come a long way from the old fashioned controllers up to new, modern technology. That’s the remote there that we use and that’s a picture of some of the design we’re working with on our JV football field.
I appreciate everyone for logging in, listening to this podcast, this is podcast number 2 for us for NESTMA. We’re going to have some really good, exciting podcasts for the coming months. Check out theturfzone.com and thanks for joining me!
Turf Zone: Thanks, Ben. For images and information and to follow along with this project in Ben’s slides from the presentation, visit our show notes. Make sure you don’t miss an episode – subscribe to the NESTMA podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
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