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Sunday, February 13, 2011

My First Drip Irrigation Experiment

Today, I am very excited to write about my last weekend adventure of setting up my own first drip irrigation system.

First things first, about the material sourcing. I got all my drip parts purchased from Metro Drip Irrigation (P) Ltd, Bangalore. the shop is on SJP road very well known. Hence if you are lost there other traders on the road should be able to guide you.

I took 12mm 300 mtr inland drip pipe, drill (to drill the PVC pipe with proper round slots), PVC joint set (its a straight connector with the rubber wiser), Pearcer to make drip holes, end caps, elbows, straight connectors etc. all in the range of 10 each. also i took micro tube of 100 mtr length which i didnt use.

Second making of it. Our source of water is the 4000 Ltrs overhead water tank. Its mainly to supply water to the animal sheds for feeding. since we had one existing outlet for comman chores we thought of splitting it and making it our source point for main line.

From Drip Irrigation Experiment

then to control the pressure we put a ball valve.

From Drip Irrigation Experiment

Initally we tried a straight zig zag layout to all the rows without a main line, it ended up serving only 2 rows :). Then we shifted to the current design of a main line 1" pvc pipe with ball valve as pressure regulator and then branch lines serving each row with 12mm drip lateral.

once the pipe was lay'd and pressure tested, next we had to punch the drip pipe for the outflow, that was also quite a learning initially we punctured it randomly. Then when we tested, we saw it had become a nice sprinkler system rather than a drip irrigation :) so realizing the mistake we did small holes along the line marked on the drip line and made it face ground wards. this was effective and with the control of pressure valve, were able to control the flow LPH (Liter per Hour).