Summer Sports - Cricket
groundsman’s shed. Peter Robinson in manual control mode at present
The Hunter controller in the
The filter to catch leaves and other roof and downpipe debris. A clean out every couple of months is all that’s needed
“The ECB deserve a pat on the back for creating the momentum and providing the money. The concept is certainly gathering pace, and it's very exciting”
along. It really worked well for us,” says Peter. “At the moment, we’ve got the sprinklers set at 2-4 minutes and that seems to do the job, certainly looking at the germination success of our autumn re-seeding.” “The real benefit to all of us involved in pitch preparation at the club, our groundsman Keith Stone in particular, is
that there is no need for the hours and hours of deploying hoses and getting them back in. Now, you just press a button and, twelve minutes or so later, you’ve irrigated the whole square. Sometime soon we’ll be brave enough to try the automatic mode, then we can stay at home and let the system work solo.” Controlling evaporation is, of course, still important, that is why the club sticks to evening watering. Since the water is stored underground, and at a constantly low temperature, algae and other harmful forces are not a threat. It’s as near perfect rainwater as you can get. The reticulation circuit that has been set up covers the sixteen main pitches in the middle of the square, plus the outer junior pitches and one for the practice cages. In all, thirty playing strips get rainwater irrigated. This is routine stuff for golf courses, but cricket clubs, especially village ones, don’t have the income to fund irrigation set- ups like this.
It’s still early days, but the club thinks it has saved about £500 in the first full year of operation, and this has made a significant cost-base difference to its running.
groundsman’s shed inhibits the system if rain actually falls
A rain gauge on top of the
“On economic grounds alone, you can’t actually justify a project like this,” says Peter. “A £20,000 investment to save less than
£1,000 a year? A twenty year payback? That’s the issue we’ve got in cricket. The problem is we seem to be the only country that still uses drinking water to irrigate sportsfields and gardens. At £1.30 a cubic metre, no wonder our friends downunder think we’re crazy.” The bigger picture, as far as this club’s
project is concerned, is that it has been feeding information into a Cranfield University study on water management, run by Dr Ian James and commissioned by the ECB. Peter himself has really got caught up in the whole water conservation and efficiency thing, and is keen to make the club’s rainwater harvesting do an even better job. “We don’t yet know what the optimum
irrigation rate is for a clay-based cricket square and, if we could be more precise in our watering, we might improve the square still further,” says Peter. “Sprinkler systems, like the one we have here, are great technology, but it’s sand-based golf turf where all the research stats are.” The Addington Village club is a pioneering force in rainwater harvesting, and other clubs, as well as cricket bodies, are starting to get interested in what it has done. Peter recently made a presentation, for instance, to members of
Plenty of roof space to gather rainwater 48 PC APRIL/MAY 2012
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