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Author: John

Master Greenkeeper John Quinn is the author of Performance Bowling Greens, and several other titles on Greenkeeping, Club and Business Management.

Irrigation Running Costs and Bowls Club Success

A funny time of year to be talking about irrigation but it is a surprisingly popular search term for the site.

So what are the costs of running irrigation on your green?

Well as you would imagine this can easily turn into a “how long is a piece of string?” type of debate. That’s due of course to the plethora of different irrigation systems around the country and of course the weather.

However, what we can do is look at some basic irrigation facts and then, armed with some key information from your irrigation hardware and utility bills; we can make a good estimate of the costs of running the system.

First let’s look at fixed costs:

These are primarily the cost of maintaining the system after its in place. On newer systems this will probably take the form of the cost of a maintenance contract with a qualified irrigation engineer; as the system gets older this will also have to have an element of contingency planning for new parts etc.

Then we look at the variable costs such as electricity and water:

Where most of your irrigation is carried out on automatic (recommended) the variable cost of labour is negligible. So we need to know how much a unit of electricity costs us and we can get that information from the bill, same with the water costs.

Armed with the cost of water per m3 and the cost of electricity per kw/h we can then work out the actual true cost of running irrigation on our greens.

Pump Outputs are typically expressed in litres per minute.

However, for the majority of systems that are configured as Read more

Statistical Analysis; to give you the Bowls Green Maintenance answers you need

Don’t worry, we’re not going all mathematical on you.

Over the past 2 years the traffic to this site has steadily grown and now provides help and advice to a big proportion of the UK Bowling Club Scene.

I know this, because like every website; in the background we have what are known as Web Stats or statistics.

The web stats provide a lot of good information and allow us to mould the content of the site to provide the kind of advice we think you want.

One of the really great parts of these web stats is the section that allows us to see what terms people type into search engines before being directed to the site.

For this month alone, the list extends to over 4 full A4 pages of search topics, many of them in the form of questions like for example “will too much water harm our green?” or “what are the favourable conditions for fusarium?”

So what I thought I’d do is start to answer some of these questions at the rate of perhaps 1 a day and see how we get on with that.

Keep your eyes peeled for our new “web search” Tag

Speak to you soon John

Bowls Club Success Manifesto

Speaking to club officials as I go around the countryside, it’s never long before the conversation turns to the difficulties in retaining members, keeping the club afloat and general club survival issues.

Of course, the time of year makes it all the worse, as clubs going into the winter with financial difficulties are obviously in a delicate condition. It’s never clear how many members will pay their subs again and want to come back next year.

For many clubs it doesn’t look great this year; the combination of the already prevalent factors related to the state of the game with the very strange series of weather events (very cold and prolonged winter, followed by a very cold and very dry spring, followed by a very hot and dry spell of weather for many of us in June and July) has left a lot of clubs with worries about their survival.

This has led me to change around my plans recently and prioritise my work to make sure you have access to the right kind of information at the right time.

So, although we said that our new eBook: Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround would be available at the end of August, we have delayed this until the 25th September, so that we could bring forward the release of our new Manifesto for Bowling Club Success.

I know, I know it’s a bit of a mouthful, but I think “manifesto” describes this new guide most accurately as it provides clubs with a document that can be adopted and then adapted into a declaration of your intention to work on a plan to rejuvenate your club’s fortunes.

Our Manifesto for Bowling Club Success includes 4 main sections as follows:

Part 1. Accepting the New Order of the Game

Part 2. Club Turnaround

Part 3. Long Term Strategic Planning

Part 4. How to Imbed Best Practice

It is available FREE now. Just click here to access your copy; and please let us know what you think and how you plan to use it in your club.

Irrigation for Bowls Greens

Further to my previous post a lot of clubs have been in touch recently to ask for advice about irrigation systems; mainly about the cost of installing them.

Readers of my ebook Performance Bowling Greens a practical guide will know that I am not a big fan of the industry accepted standard for bowling green watering systems. They simply don’t work well enough.

Where standard irrigation systems are struggling to apply enough water to help with fending off LDP or indeed to apply sufficient water as part of Read more

Bowls Green Maintenance and Club Survival

The link between Bowling Green Maintenance and Bowling Club Survival has never been more obvious…has it?

Later this week we will be releasing our new publication Bowling Club Survival and in it the process of Green Maintenance is shown to be critical in several different ways.

The most obvious link between Bowling Green Maintenance and Bowling Club Survival is of course that the club with a better green should be able to attract more members and tournaments, thus giving that club a better chance of surviving.

Secondly of course there is another obvious link; and that is that if we reduce expenditure on green maintenance then we will save costs and therefore give our club a better chance of survival.

Between these two clear survival strategies lies a quandary that many clubs have found themselves in for decades now:

“if we spend more money on Bowling Green Maintenance the green will be better; so if a better green would give us a better chance at Club Survival, we shouldn’t be cutting expenditure on Green Maintenance”

In Bowling Club Survival we will discuss why the answer to this argument isn’t as obvious as it seems and leave you with a clear strategy to make progress on this issue fast; but that’s only the beginning because this new guide will tackle 7 distinct strategies that must be mastered in order to give clubs the best chance of surviving the current challenges in both the economy and the game of bowls itself.

Please complete the form below to register your interest and we will ensure that you are among the first to be alerted when the guide is launched.