Welcome back to the living water irrigation podcast. On last episode we discussed sprays and rotors. So in sprinklers, Tulsa, we were talking about the number of different types of discharge, um,
mediums for the water from your sprinkler system. There’s rotors and sprays and drip irrigation or micro irrigation. Um, there’s also some subterranean stuff then we’ll get into in the future, but we went over rotors and sprays. Um, now on today’s episode talking sprinklers, Tulsa, we are going to go over drip irrigation and micro drip irrigation. So, um, drip irrigation probably a lot of folks have heard of. It’s just a long, typically a brown hose that has a number of holes in it space now that um, small amounts of water come out as that individual stones zone or station is running. Drip irrigation is most commonly used in commercial applications. A lot of landscape architects these days are specifying the utilization of drip on all the flower beds and most of your commercial applications. Um, the drip irrigations comes in a number of different sizes. It’s rated in gallons per hour versus where rotors in sprays are judged and gallons per minute drip irrigation is in gallons per hour. Ewing
So most commonly use is 0.6 gallons per hour. That’s going to be on a 12 inch spacing of the emitters. And uh, basically without getting super technical and super involved, you just basically take drip irrigation and you’re going to weave it through the plant material and the flower beds the year wanting to irrigate. The other really important thing about drip irrigation is that you build a ladder, um, of the drip irrigation. So between your little serpentine, through the flower beds, you want to make sure that there’s some areas where you are teeing into that servant team to build you a ladder as it goes through the flower bed. The reason for that is to make sure that all of your flow is consistent. So if you’re just putting that through there in a surfing team, like a lot of folks do a soaker hose, which we’ll get into the soaker hose briefly.
But, um, if you just serve in teen that through the flower bed, you’re obviously going to have a much different discharge of water at the first foot of that versus the 500th foot. So you want to make sure that your flow is consistent through out, um, the application throughout the utilization of the drip irrigation. So have you done, if you just put a number of t’s a as you go along, depending on the size of the bed and there’s a bunch of different other variables and factors there, but you’re just wanting ensure that you have equal flow throughout the, um, station throughout the zone. So, um, the other type that we were discussing is micro drip irrigation. So what that is, that’s super small emitters that are same theory as a sprinkler head. So a number of little emitters that are going to be placed throughout what you’re wanting to cover.
Micro drip is most commonly used in flowerpots, Sprinklers Tulsa, or hanging baskets, things like that. Um, you know, and they’re just small little steaks or emitters or bubblers. We’ll also get the bubblers for trees here in a second. But uh, they are, when we’re talking about sprinklers, Tulsa and talking about micro drip, most commonly used for flower pots. We use them a lot. Um, as we’re designing a residential irrigation system and you know, the homeowner has some flowerpot sitting on their deck or their front porch. We can off of that flower bed station or zone, we can put what’s called a dread manifold in which is a pressure regulating manifold. And then from there install the drip stakes to be able to water the flower pots as well, obviously. So you’re not out there having to hand water the flowerpots and those flowers and hanging baskets of things. Ewing
Um, so what we really like to use and our applications, um, as opposed to drip is soaker hose good old fashioned, so grows that everybody’s seen at the Lowe’s and home depot. So when we’re talking sprinklers, Tulsa said, well we do is as opposed to drip irrigation. Now obviously it’s specified in a whole lot of the commercial jobs we use. So when something is specified, when something designed, that way, we don’t have a choice. That’s what we must install. The thing that I try to encourage homeowners to stay away from is drip irrigation. It constantly has problems that gets clogged. It breaks, it gets cut, it freezes. Um, you know, there’s, there’s a number of problems that continue to have them. A drip irrigation if you don’t get it cleaned out, if it doesn’t have the proper filtration system, uh, you know, it must be pressure regulated, all that stuff.
So we actually installed soaker hose, so we’ll do a pressure regulated zone and we will, uh, put soaker hose and build the same ladder system. We did that a lot in home gardens for edibles. Edibles don’t like a lot of, uh, water on the leaves. So if you’re doing soaker hose, you’re getting good root watering, um, as opposed to, you know, what a spray head would provide you or a rotor. Uh, all of our flower beds that we do residentially, we used spray heads. I don’t ever recommend soaker hose or drip irrigation. I believe that the coverage from a spray zone is so much more efficient and so much more accurate. Uh, well, let me rephrase. Not as efficient. Obviously, when you’re designing springboard’s salsa, it as much more efficient to get that from root watering. But the longterm benefits of a spray zone versus drip irrigation are much, much higher. So thank you so much for joining us today. And when you’re thinking sprinklers, Tulsa, thank living water irrigation.