Drip irrigation system

Dripper insertid in a pipe

It’s often by chance that great discoveries are made, and that is exactly what happened back in early 1930 in the Negev desert in Israel. Simcha Blass, an engineer noticed a large tree growing in his back garden without being watered. Simcha dug the dry ground around the tree and found that water was leaking from a water pipe and the damp from the dripping water was reaching the roots of the tree. With the discovery of this leaking pipe the concept of drip irrigation was

born. Simcha Blass proceeded to experiment with different kinds of “leaking pipe”. He found that if he created very small holes through which the water could drip, they soon got blocked by the impurities in the water so he created a device using friction and pressure loss to leak drops of water at regular intervals.

In Australia Hannis Thill also worked on different methods of using plastic pipe to drip feed water to plants.

There are a number of different drip irrigation systems on the market, Netafim, the company that Simcha Blass created, manufacture large amounts of dripline. Dripline is a plastic pipe into which drippers are inserted. Other drip irrigation methods use drippers directly inserted into low-density polyethylene pipe using a punch tool and a barbed dripper or the dripper is attached to a micro pipe that then allows you to install the dripper near the base of the plant you want to water.

When and where to use drip irrigation

You can use drip irrigation in most situations, it is ideally suited to small areas, roof top gardens, balconies and large shrubberies or in agriculture where you have a high value crop planted in rows. If you install a drip line system  on a slope, it would be best to use self compensating drippers so that the water drips at the same rate at the top of the slope as at the bottom.  On a large area make sure you follow the contour of the area rather than up and down.

One of the main problems with drip irrigation is the emitters can get blocked especially if you are using water from a bore hole, well or rain water harvesting tank. in these instances you should use a filter. If you only have a few pots to water and mains water pressure is high, above 2 bar, you should install a pressure reducer to avoid the drippers popping out of the pipe.

At Arcadia Irrigation we stock dripper pipe and LDPE pipe that we supply to our irrigation contractor customers. sales@arcadiairrigation.co.uk