The Water That Wasn't

The Lake FW's Course Log

Technology in turfgrass has certainly made my life easier, but this past week it pulled a fast one on me.

The 7th fairway on the Lake course started to appear dry about 2 weeks past.  Not that uncommon as that is one of the fairways we struggle with.  We did the usual procedure by turning on heads from the clock and increasing their time on the computer later.  When that wasn't working we bumped up the time on the entire fairway.  During this time we also hand watered the fairway with hoses and small portable sprinklers.  By the time we get through all of that we usually start to see some recovery, but not this time.


I was out this past Sunday and turned some heads on from the central control in the office before heading out.  As I was leaving the shop, the heads I turned on weren't running even though the computer showed that they were.  A false positive!

Even though the computer showed that the sprinklers had worked, they had in fact, not worked.  The norm for me has been for the computer to tell me nothing worked, but had in fact worked.  After a brief amount of investigation and part changing, the problem wasn't identifying itself until I bumped some station wires and everything started coming on!  What happened was that one of the station boards was shorting itself out on the metal frame.

In hindsight, I don't know how we could have caught it quicker, but I will be checking with our Rainbird reps for more insight.