Sunday morning, we resumed irrigating Ferguson field…but the sprinkler wasn’t working correctly. It was either not rotating, or rotating very slowly. The impulse action was very subdued, and the spray pattern was different.
Our first thought was: the pump is broken! But the easier thing to check was the sprinkler. Inspection of the emitter nozzles revealed debris partially plugging them. We removed the nozzles, poked out the foreign matter with a cotton swab stick, reinstalled the nozzles, and powered up the pump.
That seemed to do the trick. The impulse sprinkler began operating normally again, and throughout the six two-hour sprinkler sets on Sunday, it consistently threw water farther than before. The smaller nozzle also emitted a more consistent stream.
Farm life means fixing things!
