Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Pulling the River Pumps

It took months but we finally got the last job from summer competed.  The wear the pump shafts saw over the last couple seasons required us to remove the pumps and send them away to be refurbished.

Removing Access Hatch
Pulling First Pump Through Roof
Both Pumps Loaded for Repair
The unknown is the cost.  Last time out it cost $10 000 for both.  Until they get the pumps apart and look at the wear the actual cost is hard to say.  Guaranteed it will not be less.  To compliment the maintenance work we completed this fall at the river intake we are looking at ways to mitigate the wear the pumps experience during run off.   One idea is installing a screen sized for the material suspended in the water during run off that is the entire length of the pump (i.e. from the blue pedestal all the way to the bottom bowl).  It's more involved than I'm letting on but the catch with that one is you have to be able to clean it.  Not impossible for us but not that easy either (go here for a reminder?).  The other option is a well but to meet our demands that could cost in the ten's of thousands.  I pretty sure this year will be an exploratory year since grand expenditures aren't really in the cards.

Monday, December 3, 2012

Man, I Hate November....

If there was one month I could do without it would be November.  No golf, no skiing, grey skies and sucky weather.  The last 7 to10 days have seen conditions change from snow and winter to open turf, slush and ice because of rain and then back to winter.  I can now say removing the snow from select greens earlier on was the right choice, especially since the surfaces were covered with a nice snow layer soon afterward.  I left some of the slushy snow on one section on 9 green and watched what happened to the snow conditions and observed that if I had left the wet layer of snow on those greens I'm pretty sure we would've had the beginnings of an ice layer.

Layers on 9 Green
I didn't get to pat myself on the back for long because the weather went funky again and we got rain and mild temperatures and we were right back into another tough spot 7 days later.  This time I did not remove the snow mostly because of the amount and the wet weather.  There was enough snow and so much moisture in the snow that the blowers would not have been able to throw it far enough without us having to double handle it.  Further, once you start to blow snow that wet you have to get it off because it is guaranteed to form ice.  Anyways, the hope was for mild temperatures for a few days and maybe even rain like we had earlier on to get the snow to a more manageable level.  No luck.

Multi layers #11 Green
Now we have 7 cm fresh snow over about 3 cm "tight" corn snow over very thin ice on those greens we did not blow the first time out.  The greens we cleaned have about 6cm snow over 2 cm tight corn snow layer.  All surfaces are unfrozen and if we get a good cover before the temperature really drops that could help keep that corn layer from getting more ice like.