On Tuesday, after topdressing greens, we set up an irrigation cycle to run for 6 minutes to irrigate the sand further into the turf canopy. That cycle was set to begin at 4:00AM. At 4:09AM, I received an email from our pumpstation (pretty cool technology so I know what's happening at all times) saying the pumps kicked off because of low pressure. This basically means the pumpstation couldn't supply enough water for the amount of sprinkler heads we had running. This feature is built into the pumpstation software because in the event of a major water main break, the pumps won't keep pumping water that is just being wasted. The low pressure discharge alarm tells us that either the filter is clogged, or the intake is clogged or blocked.
To solve the problem, I had divers from Charleston come up and go down and look at the intake in the lake. The intake is an 18" pipe were water enters the irrigation system, pumped from the lake into the irrigation pipes. It turns out the culprit was aquatic weeks covering the intake, only allowing a small amount of water by. This is good news. It could have been much worse. Sometimes during heavy storms like we just had, sediment can accumulate around the intake pipe, which is a much more complicated problem to deal with. By manually removing the vegetation growing around the intake, we were able to get the pumpstation back up to pressure.