Summer Sports - Cricket
Man...
concerned about restricted irrigation, and it was the simple, yet untried, idea of water harvesting that was at the core of the club’s application for a grant. Drought Orders were in place in 2006 and Defra went through the Appeal process, which happens as soon as water companies start talking about pressure on their stocks. An inspector will always say that people’s supplies come first, then decides the pecking order from all other quarters, sports facilities included. Peter made the case for the cricket club, emphasising how the game would suffer a huge set-back, after the then Ashes euphoria, if pitches were allowed to go dry. The water companies conceded a one hour a week dispensation after 7.00pm, as before. At this appeal meeting, a representative of Mid-Kent Water came up to Peter and asked him if he’d ever thought about water harvesting, and offered to do a free feasibility study. He hadn’t, and accepted the offer. “For rainwater harvesting, the club is luckier than most in terms of having a lot of available roof space, and this ticked a lot of boxes in the water company’s feasibility study,” says Peter.
He obviously made a good case to the ECB, amply backed by a water company feasibility report, and it duly coughed up £10,000 to get the project under way. In the end, the project cost pretty much double that, but Peter is a past master when it comes to acquiring grant funding. Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council, Landfill tax credit organisations, and Kent County Council have been
among those to back the club’s enterprising spirit. “To date, we are the only club to have
taken the grant up for rainwater harvesting,” he adds. “There were very few takers anyway. It’s not apathy. I reckon it’s because the green agenda is not to do directly with playing cricket. Also, most parts of the country haven’t, in recent years, experienced drought. They might have applied for a grant for a pump to shift waterlogging! Some, in the north west, have actually gone this way. With the significant difference there is in rainfall east-west, north south, it’s water management really that is the over all issue.”
Once the funding was in place - at least a substantial part of it - Peter began to look for the necessary hardware. A villager is a night shift driver for Kent company, Marley, which specialises in rainwater piping and allied products. He suggested the club should approach them. “This was certainly a good move,” says
Peter. “Marley offered me a thirty-seven percent discount on piping and underground storage, plus free access to their design engineer, who would help us with the layout. It was an offer we couldn’t refuse, and we didn’t.” The club did the installation
themselves, and it was up and running in autumn 2010. Maximum underground capacity at any one time is 25,000 litres, and this gives them the ability to collect in the region of 100,000 litres of water in
a year, reckons Peter.
This just about saw the club through the very dry conditions from April to June last year.
Gutters and downpipes connect to an
underground storage facility, which has a coarse filter for collecting leaves and other debris. This just needs to be cleaned out every couple of months or so. Otherwise, there’s virtually no maintenance. Water then passes into a cyclone filter, before passing into the tank, which is like a stack of large beer crates connected by baffles, into which particulates collect and coagulate into the bottom of the tank rather than in the irrigation nozzles. As far as the irrigation system is concerned, this came from local supplier Chris Mardon of Greenkeeping Services. A Hunter XC entry-level residential controller is more than adequate for the table’s six watering points. If necessary, it offers a three-programme range and up to four start times each. The irrigation controller is in the
groundsman’s shed, and this operates six sprinkler rotors around the perimeter of the cricket table. Peter says that, thus far, he’s stuck to manual operation but, one of these days, he’ll bite the bullet and put it on auto. The controller is linked to a rain gauge on the groundsman’s shed, which would always prevent the auto from coming on if it has actually rained, so over watering would be avoided. “I was able to whack on about 1200
litres a time during the early season drought last year, until real rainfall came APRIL/MAY 2012 PC 47
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