Lawn watering system/sprinklers

[readiescards]

I seemed to have picked the dryest weeks of the year to try and establish a lawn from seed...any lawn watering system recommendations as I'm currently losing an hour a day dragging a sprinkler about.

 

Thanks

[lizzie]

we put our seed down nearly 2 months ago and despite hours of sprinkler it is still very patchy and a dust bowl in places. I have taken to going over the dryest patches with the hose as well as the sprinkler. I ditched the long sprinkler (as one in your picture) and got a circular one that does a bigger area so I have to move it less. I am sprinkling in three moves and doing each area for an hour in the evening so 3 hours a day and now I am doing 3 times a week not every day now grass is growing. Yours looks bigger area than mine.

[PeterW]

2 hours ago, readiescards said:

I seemed to have picked the dryest weeks of the year to try and establish a lawn from seed...any lawn watering system recommendations as I'm currently losing an hour a day dragging a sprinkler about.

 

Thanks

 

 

Your best bet is to leave it and let it establish naturally as otherwise you will be watering daily and probably going through 2-3000 litres a day. 

 

If you’re desperate to water it and keep it looking good then try these guys - always had good service and they know their stuff with irrigation equipment. 

[jack]

I did quite a bit of research on sprinklers systems recently, and the Caber Colibri system looked decent for lawns. Jeremy has their drip irrigation system and spoke highly of it in my earlier thread. It's one of the options in PeterW's link above.

[Temp]

We tried connecting three Hoselock sprinklers to one tap but was limited by the flow rate we could get out of it. The third one didn't really increase the area being watered as the pressure dropped on the first two. Very nearly lost a lot of turf simply because we couldn't water it fast enough.

[jack]

Do you know what your water pressure's like @Temp?

[Temp]

Not sure of the pressure but I'd say it's a bit above average. We can get >40L/min in the main bathroom with everything open. We have a 25mm main to the house, and from there to the outside tap we have a run of about 15ft in 15mm copper.

 

We also had an underground rainwater tank available that holds a few thousand liters but that only lasted 1 day watering the turf. The combination of sun and wind meant the turf started to shrink if left unwatered for more than an hour so it was a constant battle to move the sprinklers around fast enough. 

[Temp]

PS: Think our turf cost us £2500 and the water was about £10-15 a day for nearly two weeks.

[jack]

3 hours ago, Temp said:

PS: Think our turf cost us £2500 and the water was about £10-15 a day for nearly two weeks.

 

We're doing the same maths with our garden. We spent a lot of money on plants at the end of last Autumn. We lost a few to the odd warm-freezing-warm-freezing periods we had earlier this year, so spending some money on water to get us through this hot dry period makes good financial sense. Most of the plants should be well established by the end of the summer and shouldn't require much watering from next year. 

 

It's also spurred me to start planning rainwater storage to be installed before the end of Autumn.