Sunday, July 18, 2010
Flex Your Power
I don't remember hearing a "Flex Your Power" alert for quite some time, but we could have used one in Stockton a few days ago. Friday morning, the irrigation control computer reported our nightly output of water per each station. All the numbers looked good, so we headed out to check the areas that we had turned off and any hot spots on the course.
Richard tried to pop some heads on #13, which looked especially dry and called on the radio to relay the problem. We had no pressure and no water, so the pump must have shut down that night.
As I made my way to the pump station, the day was getting a little brighter and it became obvious that nothing received water that night. The bunkers were bone dry, the occasional puddle on the cartpath was absent, and divot sand was just like kiln dried.
The pump station is smart enough to recognize a problem and will shut down to prevent catastrophic failure. In this instance it suffered three faults in a row, resulting in a hard fault that ends the re-boot process. It is much, much better to lose one night of irrigation than to destroy a pump.
When I made it to the pump station, I simply pushed the reset button and we were back up and running. Richard turned on his hose to give parts of the putting green a drink while I scrambled back to the shop to run any programs I still had time to complete before play or our crew got soaked in the process.
At 6:00 AM there were a whole lot of sprinklers spinning circles just like the opening scene of Caddyshack. We were able to give most tees and green surrounds their normal prescription of H2O, but much of the rough and fairways would have to wait until later. Greens and approaches were supposed to be off and we checked those by hand watering.
At one point, Richard told me that this is kinda fun. I prefer to get my kicks in other fashions and would take a long string of dull, 'unfun' days for the rest of the summer.
In the afternoon, I gave all the fairways a little syringe by turning them on for two minutes each. A stretch of four, near-triple-digit days kept some of the golfers from venturing onto the tee, so a quick shot of water was easy to accomplish. By the next morning, most of everything looked fine and the pump was going strong.
Each summer this happens a few times, especially during a string of hot days. All the ACs are turned up through the night and the grid wears down. So next time you roll into the course and hear I'm Alright playing in your head, you'll know why all that water is misting up the morning.
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