Irrigate More Efficiently With A Pressure Regulating Spray Head

Doug Donahue of Ewing Irrigation demonstrates the water saving benefits of using spray heads equipped with pressure regulating stems. Transcription: In this segment, I'm going to show you how to save water and irrigate more efficiently using an optional feature available on many common spray head bodies called a PRS. PRS stands for Pressure Regulating Stem. The feature regulates the pressure coming out the nozzle to 30psi which is what the manufacturers catalog their nozzle performance at. The cutaway version of the sprinkler head here shows the optional PRS feature which again helps us to save water and water more efficiently. If you have a spray head body that's equipped with the optional PRS feature it's also marked on the top of the sprinkler head with the letters PRS as you can see here, indicating that you do have the PRS feature, the Pressure Regulating Stem, installed on this spray head body. We're now going to visually show with a demonstration how much water can be saved using the PRS feature and how much more efficiently we can irrigate. To demonstrate the water-saving potential of the PRS spray head, we're going to use this specially built manifold. I'd like to show you several of the components that will help us demonstrate the increased efficiency of the spray head and the water saving potential. Once we turn the water on, we have a flow gauge that's installed that will actually show how much water is flowing through the spray head. Next we have a gauge which is going to show you what the inlet pressure is. Here we have a spray head body that does not have the PRS option. We'll be turning that on first to show how much water's being used. Finally, we have a spray head body which is equipped with the PRS feature. We'll turn that on and we'll see the difference in the amount of water that's being used and also the larger water droplet sizes. Here we have the non-PRS version of the spray head running and you can see all of this misting and fogging, all of these real small water droplets that are susceptible to drifting and evaporation. I would venture to say most of the water coming out of this spray head right now isn't doing us much good. You can see by the gauge, we're operating at about 90psi which is much higher than what the manufacturer catalogs the spray head performance at, at 30psi. We're also using quite a bit of water. You can see how much water this one spray head is using right now. Again, we're now going to show the benefit of the PRS option in terms of the larger water droplet sizes, the more efficient watering and how much water saving potential there is. This is the spray head that's equipped with the optional PRS feature. You can see the larger water droplets. We've eliminated a lot of that misting and fogging. You can see by this gauge here we're operating at roughly 30psi, which is what the manufacturer catalogs this spray head performance at. Again, the spray head is operating much more efficiently despite the fact that we still have 90psi at the inlet and you can see now how much less water we're actually using. Every spray head will use that much less water now that we have this optional PRS feature installed. Tremendous water saving potential and much more efficient watering with the larger water droplet sizes.