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