Mink Meadows Turf Maintenance Department: 5 Green irrigation update

We tackled our irrigation issues with the fifth green feed and the live galvanized line under the green discovered last fall. We dug up the valve we always used to isolate the green. We assumed the only valve. It is deep and difficult to work with. For the last couple years it has been getting more difficult to get the key on it and at times you can see water in the bottom of the hole. Our intention was to replace this valve because of its importance as a green feed. What we found upon excavation was not a shock but disturbing none the less.

Black line is transite main. Valve is circled. Notice the plumbing spaghetti mix of plastic and galvanized. 5 plastic elbows with some galvi tossed into the mix for excitement.

To explain our best guess of this picture is this: our understanding is that all greens come directly off mainline. There must have been an original galvanized line that fed 4 green from here and rather than run a new plastic feed they tied back into it. So the black line I painted is the original 1936 transite main and there is a rusty metal saddle that feeds this valve. Then the plastic comes up and ties into a galvi pipe heading to 4 and then back to plastic up to 5.The stuff that I have seen while working on this system could fill a month's worth of blog posts: wires just below the surface; wires wrapped around pipes; plastic caps on galvi pipe; the list is endless. The contractors who installed the "new' plastic system were creative for sure. Without the water being on, it was difficult to fully diagnose this valve but I was able to discern the stem or handle was slightly bent which would account for the difficulty getting a key on it and the packing nut was a bit loose which would cause it to leak. The mixture of galvanized and plastic pipes was not something we were interested in trying to re-plum if we replaced this valve. Now that we have a ball valve on the edge of the bunker which feeds the 5th green we decided to tighten the packing nut, say a prayer to the irrigation gremlins and bury this nightmare. If we never use the valve it should remain intact and hopefully the rest will survive for all of our tenures or we replace the entire irrigation system before we have to deal with this again.

sometimes you get lucky, other times..... just another splice box to get relief from

We decided to dig a trench with the trencher since we tried to use wire tracers and metal detectors and dig in specific areas unsuccessfully. With a long deep trench we were bound to find something. Unfortunately we found some wires in the middle of nowhere. We did find the abandoned galvanised line that is live and under the green. We continued along our trench to see if we could find where it turned towards the green and maybe a fitting to take apart and re-plum so we could winterize this every year to avoid problems in the future. This would be somewhere around number 14 or 15 of old live abandoned galvi pipes we have around the course.