A very windy end to the week and it's on days like this that I would love to work on a turf farm where you get to grow your turf with no trees blowing all manner of debris down around you.  The courses were looking very clean prior to this morning and the forecast has the wind hanging around well in to next week.

Apologies to the members in the Wednesday comp this week who had sprinklers come on both 15 and 16 River fairways.  It is caused by a fault in one of the irrigation controllers that is unforeseeable and spasmodic at best.  The bad news is that the component causing the fault is now out of production and unavailable and I am fast running out of spares.  The controllers were installed in 2002 and have served very well but as with all things subject to the weather they do deteriorate over time, especially with salt air around.

Some of the controllers are double level to allow for the electronics to be above the 100 year flood level.  The upper cabinet houses the electronics and the lower the hydraulic converters.  As previously mentioned we have what's known as a hydraulic irrigation system that relies on water pressure supplied through small 4mm poly tubing to operate the valves on the sprinklers to turn them on and off.  Any interruption to this water supply means that sprinklers will come up and this is the problem with this leaking component at the moment.  So the basic operation is that the electronic boards send a signal to the hydraulic converter that releases pressure and allows the sprinkler to operate via the tube that runs from the controller to each sprinkler.  All of the controllers are centrally controlled via radio by a computer in my office and can also be programmed in the field if needed in the event of a power outage or problem with the computer. 

Double decker.

Electronics box.

Converter box.