Irrigation upgrades underway

The past month we have been working on getting our irrigation system upgrades installed. The pumps were sent out to have the electric motors as well as the pumps rebuilt. They were installed this week and are good as new and ready for another 20 years of service.

Everything in the pump station has been gone through and rebuilt or replaced as needed. The central control program that runs our irrigation system is also being replaced. The 1993 program was dos based and was adapted to Windows in the late '90's. The program had lots of glitches and we had many issues with it over the last 15 years. The new program has been available for the past four years and has shown to be very user friendly and reliable. It has some new features that will let us control sprinkler heads on the course with a smart phone or tablet, and be able to access the program to make changes from home or anywhere with Internet. All of the field satellites also had to be replaced to be compatible with the new control program.

The two photos above show Frank wiring up a new satellite with Kyle and Tim watching how it's done. All but three of the new satellites have been installed. We have a new weather station that has to be installed and the central computer in the irrigation office also needs to get set up with field data for each of our 1300+ sprinkler heads. Last week five of our staff including Vic and Josh (Asst supt's), Frank and Tim (irrigation tech's), and myself spent two days at Suncadia learning the new Toro Lynx system. The system should be up and running within the next month which will give us time to work with the new program and be ready to go for this upcoming season. 

What do you guys do all winter?

What do you guys do all winter? I get asked this question from October until March every year. Drainage, tree work, irrigation, and equipment repair are just some of the things we do during the winter months. The bridge on #11 had four deck beams that were cracked and needed to be replaced. We had a plywood patch over the broken beams when the stream restoration project started last summer. The first trip over the bridge by the contractor broke the four beams and that's why there was a steel plate on the bridge until mid October. Monday morning of this week was time to replace the broken decking.

  With the plywood patch removed you can see the damage.

The old decking was cut off and the bolts removed to make way for the new ones.

The finished product is a working bridge but the new beams make the old ones look really bad. It would be nice to replace the entire bridge with a design similar to the ones on #6 and #8.