Q. How do I calculate sprinkler risers losses in a sprinkler zone where the risers are extra long, 3 ft or more above ground? I have 10 risers in a zone for my proposed sprinkler irrigation system.
A. If you are using my Sprinkler System Design Tutorial and a standard riser of the recommended size, then you don’t need to worry about pressure lose in the riser, the tutorial has friction loss for the risers built-in to the formulas it uses. So you can ignore the riser pressure loss. Some standard risers are shown on the page on Sprinkler Risers in the Irrigation Installation Tutorial. The recommended size for a riser? In most cases it should be the same size as the threaded inlet on the sprinkler. But please actually read that page on risers, as there are some exceptions to that rule for certain types of standard risers!
Non-Standard Risers:
OK, I realize that didn’t answer your question, you are asking about a non-standard riser that uses a long pipe to hold the sprinkler high above the ground. In that case you must calculate what the friction loss will be in the longer-than-normal riser pipe. (In this case that would be the 3 ft long pipe you described in your question above.) To do that you simply use the same friction loss spreadsheets that you use to calculate the friction loss in any other pipe. Just use this link to get the proper spreadsheet from my website for the type of pipe you are using. Then open the spreadsheet and on the first line enter the pipe size, GPM of the sprinkler you will install on the riser, and the length of the riser. Enter an error factor of 1.4 rather than the default 1.1. This is because even your “longer” riser is shorter than the typical pipe length that the default error factor is based on. Now read the friction loss. That’s it, you have the friction loss for your non-standard riser! Don’t worry about the fittings like ells and couplings that are part of the riser, that is part of what the error factor is compensating for.
When adding the riser friction loss into the total friction loss calculations for your whole sprinkler system, just add in the loss for a single riser. Use the friction loss value for the riser that has the highest friction loss. (This is most likely the one with the highest GPM sprinkler, or it may be the longest riser if you have different riser lengths. You may have to calculate the friction loss for several different risers to figure out which of them has the highest loss.) Why do you add in the friction loss for only one sprinkler, rather than the combined loss for all of them? Because as a single drop of water goes through the sprinkler system it only goes through one sprinkler, not all of the sprinklers. You have to think about the water as a collection of millions of drops, not as one solid body. So the pressure loss is what a single drop would experience as it travels through the system. As a drop of water enters the sprinkler system it travels through a water meter, lots of pipe, a valve or two, then it finally blows out through a single sprinkler onto the landscape. The pressure loss calculation for the whole sprinkler system is determined by what the worst case pressure loss values would be for a single drop of water traveling through the sprinkler system.
OK, so you calculated the friction loss, but what if it is a really high value, or maybe the calculator complained about the velocity being to high. In this case you need to use a larger size pipe for your riser. For the velocity in a riser you can go all the way up to the 7 ft/sec maximum without too much risk. Velocities in the marginal “use caution” zone are generally OK for risers. High velocity in a riser will seldom cause a water hammer problem, unless you are using a special type of sprinkler that has a solenoid valve built in to it. Those sprinklers are called “valve-in-head sprinklers”, they are very expensive, and are mostly used for golf course greens.
