Large Scale Drip Systems

[darthslater]

I was wondering how many people use or have experience with drip systems, low pressure or other.

[spudleafwillie]

Dean,
when i was growing 125 different spud-leaf varieties, all in containers, i had drip irrigation. It was set up as an automatic drip watering system with 4 zones watering all pots twice a day. Its not hard to do, or very expensive, but takes a lot of time to design and initially set it up. Let me know if u need help doing it as it is a tremendous time saver besides eliminating water stress.

Spud

[dld]

or... just drink lots of water and take a walk...(hint...hint)

[landarc]

I don't know anything about irrigation, strictly a dry gardener.



hehe, other than that professional irrigation design thingy. Spud is right, they are easy to configure and place.

[gobmaters]

I have lots of experience over many years now. I assume you are talking about field production with low pressure drip lines under plastic beds or beside the row on bare ground. The biggest concern in this system is to have really clean water because the openings in the tubes are so small that they can become easily clogged. If you are watering from a well or other drinking water source, filtering is fairly inexpensive. If you are watering from a pond or stream, you need sand filters to clean the water sufficiently. The layout is fairly simple and does not take a lot of time to do. Drip is really great because you conserve water, keep the tops of the plants dry, and can water at the same time you are working in the field. It's definitely the way to go.
GOBmaters

[sunflowers]

I have used it from time to time on as much as 10 acres of stuff. It can really save your crop IF you get it set up.

Often we are so busy that we keep putting it off until absolutely necessary. Not the best way to use it, but when you have too many jobs to do, oh well.

I'm sure others will disagree with me, but i wouldn't worry about the design part if you have a bit of smarts and read a lot. I'm what I like to call a "Rube Goldburg" plumber and i've done all the drip set-up on our farm. We use both a well and a pond depending on where we are on the farm. Unless you have some really uchy water with fine particulates, a 1 inch 150 mesh filter has worked OK for us.

We also don't use a pressure regulator on the system. Basically if you set-up enough rows in your system with long enough runs, you just find the number that your pump will run and go with that.

Basically we use mostly 2 inch lay-flat from the trash pump to the field. We then use 1.25 inch black PVC headers with the slip couplings at each row. for the most part we don't use hose clamps on the fittings until the pipe gets rather worn out from changing around. That's part of how we know we aren't "over-pressure". The slip fittings will usually hold together fine at under 10 lbs but blow apart at around 15 +.

For us we can usually run 5 or 6 - 250 ft rows off the well or 10 - 12 rows up to 400 ft long from the trash pump in the pond. It varies with how far we are from the water and what kind of hose we are running with. A tip I got way back when is to use an over-sized line from your source to your header. Our pressure tank only has a 1 inch fitting but we run 2 inch line out to the field instead of 3/4 inch garden hose. You have much less friction loss that way and can get a lot more water our hundreds of feet from your well. We've run as far as 1500 ft of 2 inch off the trash pump from the pond and still were able to run 6-8 lines.

A decent place to get most of the supplies at about the best prices I've found is Irrigation Mart out of Lousiana. They have a web site but I usually call in when I need something.

OH, it seems like a rule that we will be desperate for rain and need to get the system set-up UNTIL i spend about $500-1000 on supplies. Quite often by the time they get here we no longer need it. We have 2 rolls of layflat and 2 rolls of drip still sitting here that I ordered last summer.

Carol

[darthslater]

Great info all, but we need some pictures of a working unit!

[sunflowers]

I don't know if I've ever had the time to take any pics when the system was running. I'm usually too busy to even think about pics then.

Carol