Irrigation at Huron Hills

The irritation irrigation at Huron Hills is often a challenge. Whenever we start digging, you never know what you will find. This irrigation leak near #7 green has been on the agenda for quite a while. Last year, we dug down far enough to know that the leak was at the reducing coupling where the six-inch main line went down to 2.5 inches.  This type of repair is not easy and the leak was not big, so we opted to do it in the spring before we started up the water. This gave us a couple of advantages. The first is that we did not have to drain the water out of the main line. With a 6 inch diameter main line, this would be thousands of gallons of water we would have to remove. The second advantage is that usually in the spring, the water needs of the grass is not high and a fix of this size can take a couple of days.

When we got back and started digging out the lines, what we found was a maze of pipes.

I have no idea what the thinking behind this design was.

The six inch main line runs from the lower right to the upper left in this picture.

It seems like this might have been a repair and replacement of a four way joint, or cross. These cross joints are extremely tough to replace, especially on a six inch pipe. The "solution" was to put in a tee coming out to the north and size it down to 2.5 inches. Then come out and make a 90 degree turn with an "elbow" to the east. After another 3 feet of 2.5 inch pipe, a tee was added. This matched up with the 2.5 inch pipe that headed east. The problem was in then connecting to the 2.5 inch pipe that runs west. It is on the other side of the 6 inch mainline and at the same depth. They then took another elbow and came up enough to clear the mainline and then bring it back down on the other side. 

I should mention that the mainline here is only about 18 inches below ground. This meant that the pipe coming over the mainline was less than a foot below the surface.

We decided to put in two tees off of the mainline. One for the east and one going west. 

The two tees coming off the mainline.

In order to realign the pipe, we used 45 degrees turns. This cuts down on the pressure loss that would be experienced using 90 degree elbows.

The finished product with a new quick coupler that we will be able to use on #7 green.