Irrigation Systems

A well-adjusted system will as a rule use less water than watering with a hosepipe, because it delivers water where it is needed, in the early morning, and in measured amounts. In season a lawn generally needs around twenty-five millimetres of water a week in total, rainfall included, and it is better to give that in two deeper waterings than in seven shallow ones. Consumption depends on the type of sprinklers, the zoning and the soil, and fine-tuning the zones is precisely where most of the saving is made.

Early in the morning, roughly between four and eight o'clock — the wind is light then, evaporation is low, and the leaf dries off by midday. Watering in the evening leaves the grass damp overnight, which encourages fungal disease, while watering at midday wastes the most water. A programmable controller holds to that time without any input from you, and when we install one we set it according to the zones and the soil type.

It can. The pipes are laid through narrow slits rather than by digging up the whole surface, so the lawn knits back together within a few weeks and the traces disappear. Before any digging we measure the water pressure and flow, since these determine how many zones the system can have and which sprinklers are suitable. If the lawn is due for renewal anyway, installing before the turf is laid is more straightforward, as the work is done on an open base with no slits to close up afterwards.

The water has to be cleared out of the installation before the first frosts, usually by blowing it through zone by zone with a compressor, together with closing the main valve and draining the above-ground parts. Since the first frosts in Vojvodina normally arrive in the second half of October, that job is planned for October rather than late autumn. Any water left in the pipes and sprinklers expands as it freezes and cracks precisely the parts that are hardest to replace, so preparing for winter is a standard part of the seasonal maintenance we take on.