River Pump

September 13, 2015

After a very dry August and scrambling for water to fill our irrigation pond, we finally have our new river pump up and running. With just under 3 inches of rain and many warm days, irrigating was a must for almost every day during the month of August.

Before Sam headed for Colorado, he set up an electric pump to pump water underground from the pond on the left of 14 fairway to our irrigation pond. This was very beneficial as we did not have to continuously fill a gas pump every two hours to keep filling our irrigation pond and we didn’t have to listen to the loud motor running all day long. This pump set up is only a short term solution to our pond filling needs as the pond on the left side of 14 is getting quite low as well and the water isn't exactly ideal for irrigating the golf course.

Sam's last and very important project at GFCC on #14

Our previous river pump had been put in briefly and taken out of the river for maintenance issues every summer for the past 4 years. It was not the correct type of pump for fulfilling our water needs. We decided to get a 20 horsepower centrifugal motor drive pump to set down by the river behind the maintenance shop. This pump can run as long as we need it to to fill our irrigation pond and it pumps roughly 450 gallons per minute. On a full night of irrigation we use somewhere around 300,000 gallons of water on the golf course. With this pump, we can put this amount of water back into our pond in one night.

We began the process of setting up the pump by removing a large tree that hung over the river and was in the way for our river pump line. Thanks to Florian and Sons for helping us out with this. We then hauled in some dirt to level the area out and set up the pump and our river line.

Florian and Sons excavating the old style pump down in the river

This pump will greatly help us out the rest of the fall, especially if it continues to be dry. Without this pump and water for irrigating, we would be playing golf on dead grass and dirt.
We will take the pump lines out of the river and store the pump for the winter and put it back in next golf season when we are in need of filling our pond. 

We were able to use almost all of our existing pipe lines and fittings for this set up