Golf course to get irrigation upgrade

Friday, June 23, 2017

The city of Nevada is currently replacing the irrigation system at the Frank E. Peters Municipal Golf course at a cost of about $666,387.98 and when the project is finished the course will see a reduction in water usage and in the man-hours it currently takes to irrigate the course.

“This is a project Dana [Redburn] and JD [Kehrman] have been working on since 2012. These things take time to put together,” Harold Gragg, golf course maintenance supervisor, said.

“The old system was 100 percent manually operated. Someone has to physically walk up to a valve and open it and stand there and time the watering for the proper time — then go to the next one,” Gragg said.

This meant that with the old system irrigation had to be done during daylight hours when you could see what you were doing,

The new system has electronically controlled valves that can be operated by a computer in the maintenance building or from a handheld radio. And if desired, a single sprinkler head can be turned on.

With the current system that is not the case. For example, each green has four sprinkler heads and with the current system all four heads are controlled by the same valve, so if only a part of the green needs water, the entire green must be watered.

Gragg said the new system will let them enter data into the computer program and set up an irrigation schedule for each hole.

“The new system will allow us to irrigate at night, which is by far the best time to do it, or very early morning hours. By the time the golfers show up we’re not irrigating around, behind and in front of them. They won’t have to wait,” he said.

“We’re going to save 25 to 30 percent in water usage with the new system,” he said.

For example with the current system, the four heads on each green each use 30 gallons per minute. With all four running that is 120 gallons per minute and if they run for 10 minutes that is 1,200 gallons of water. With only one head running at 30 gallons per minute for 10 minutes, that is 300 gallons of water.

Gragg said the front nine holes were opened in 1978 and in 1992 holes 10-18 were installed.

“The irrigation systems under them are still in place,” he said.

“From 1979 to 2017 is 39 years. Along with the valves and the wiring, that’s a very long time. The back nine, since 1992 — that’s 25 years old,” he said.

“Just through fatigue stuff breaks. It’s all PVC pipe. It gets brittle and when the ground moves, the pipe moves,” he said.

It breaks at joints and T’s, and sometimes it will break in a straight line.

“I’ve seen it just explode,” he said.

The irrigation system has about 54,000 feet of pipe and currently 537 spray heads, that is used to irrigate 27 acres of fairway, 80-90 acres of rough and 4.6 acres of greens and tee boxes, he said.

“We’re really spread out here,” Gragg said.

The entire Twin Lakes facility occupies about 350 acres, of which, the golf course uses around 200 acres and the ball fields use 100. The 200 acres used by the golf course, probably has enough room to install a second 18-hole course, he said.

The new system will be a hybrid system using both polyvinyl chloride and high-density polyethylene pipes.

The main 8-inch, 6-inch and 4-inch pipes will be PVC, and the 3-inch and 2-inch pipes will be HDPE.

He said city crews could repair PVC pipes if the need arises so the irrigation would not need to shut down on a large part of the course for very long.

The HDPE requires special tools to repair, so the city would have to call a contractor from Kansas City, Springfield or Tulsa.

“And when you are in need of water, you don’t have time to lose. It could take two, three, four days to get that repaired. In August you don’t have two or three days. You have hours, sometimes minutes,” he said.

Gragg said Midwest Irrigation LLC has been great to work with. All this company does is golf course irrigation systems and they have devised some special equipment that allows them to bury the new piping, refill the trench, compact the soil and replace the turf, in such a way that in a couple of days there is little evidence there was any work done.

Respond to this story

Posting a comment requires free registration: