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PLEASE HELP WITH PSI, PRECIPTATION RATE

steeve725

Starting Member

Posts: 1

1

Monday, May 10th 2010, 10:54am

PLEASE HELP WITH PSI, PRECIPTATION RATE

Hi,

I moved into my house a few months ago and started the sprinkler system up for the season. NO LEAKS, a good start.

However I found out I have 33 pop-ups and 5 rotors.

I want to water as efficiently as possible.

I little help finding out the actual pressure each pop-up head is putting out, so I can determine what my precipitation rate is and my GPM is. That way I can adjust my timer accordingly.

I just want to find out the gpm my sprinkler heads are putting out. Rainbirds website shows my pop ups @ 30 psi and rates there gpm @ 30 psi. I want to know, because I can see how much water I am using.

Is there an easy way to determine how much pressure is actually at each pop up?

Doing the 5 gallon bucket test and checking the house pressure doesn't apply, as I have seperate outside lines from the city for my irrigation and household water.

However, I checked the PSI @ my sprinkler drain in my valve box, its 80 PSI !!! (I Used an orbit water gauge to test) I checked with the city about my static pressure, they state its between 70-80psi.

Thank You for any help you can give!!!

This post has been edited 1 times, last edit by "steeve725" (May 11th 2010, 6:17am)

HooKooDooKu

Supreme Member

Posts: 683

2

Tuesday, May 11th 2010, 10:15am

Well, the most basic method of getting information along the lines you're asking for is to set up several tin cups or pie pans around the yard and run the sprinkler system for a good while. Then measure the amount of water (in inches of depth) that the cups/pans collected. Then you'll know the precipitation rate (in inches of water per hour) rather than calculating gpm and dividing by lawn area.

Otherwise, there really isn't a good way to ACCURATELY meassure the working pressure at the spray head because you need to know the dynamic pressure, not the static pressure.

The other thing to do is again run the water for a certain amount of time and directly measure the total amout of water put down by checking the before/after reading on the water meter.

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