SPRINKLER COMPARISON FEATURE
Sprinklers with A PURPOSE
Irrigation landscape professionals dive into how efficient sprinkler heads make a difference.
A 34 Irrigation & Lighting March 2023
s the U.S. continues to struggle with drought, increased attention and need have been placed on efficient sprinkler heads for landscaping. Irrigation landscape professionals know of the importance of installing these water-saving
systems, but it can be easy to forget the actual logistics of how they make a difference. From what it means to be efficient to how they reduce loss of water application, runoff and drift, irrigation land- scape professionals unpack efficient sprinkler heads and how they play a vital role in today’s water usage.
It’s easy to read on a sprinkler head’s packaging that it’s efficient, but what does that really mean? Jeffrey Johnson, senior product manager, commercial
rotors and valves, Rain Bird, Azusa, California, says that for a sprinkler head to qualify as efficient, it depends on the distribution of water in a zone and is always less than 100% due to the application method, evaporation or runoff. Te terms “distribution uniformity,” “coefficient of uniformity” and “scheduling coefficient” are common irrigation terms used to define the efficiency of sprinklers or emitters. “Efficient sprinklers are those that discharge water with high uniformity and reduce the energy needed in the pro- cess of minimizing pressure or flow,” Johnson says.
Rick Hall, CIC, CID, CLIA, market development
director for K-Rain Manufacturing Corporation, Riviera Beach, Florida, says that the simplest way to describe the right product choice is “the installation and use of a sprin- kler head best suited for the area it will be watering.” Efficiency is achieved in sprinkler design when it is able
to regulate the water pressure down to the optimum level for the nozzle design and decrease water waste, says Brodie Bruner, executive vice president of Weathermatic, Garland, Texas. “An efficient sprinkler incorporates a check valve and sufficient retraction spring strength to retain water in the system rather than allow low head drainage,” Bruner says.
One of the key components of efficient sprinkler heads is their ability to reduce loss of water application. Alexis Deasy, senior marketing communications man-
ager at Te Toro Company, Bloomington, Minnesota, ex- plains that there are multiple ways that efficient sprinkler heads successfully do this, such as by “reducing flushing at start-up so that there is little to no water waste or a head to pop-up, reducing misting and fogging at the head through pressure regulation and ensuring that when the nozzle is damaged or removed, wasteful geysers can be prevented.”
irrigationandlighting.org
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