Waterfield Solutions has been instrumental in providing Leicester City football club with a highly versatile pitch irrigation system.



It completely fulfils the club's needs for a solution that offers extremely accurate irrigation levels, conserves water and includes the facility for remote management. Based on Rain Bird's IQ-Cloud irrigation management technology, it was supplied through LWS, Rain Bird's principal UK distributor.

Leicester City monitors moisture levels across all its playing surfaces to ensure accurate irrigation can be applied. Access to the correct information with regards to the application of water is essential. The timing of irrigation is also critical and the club works hard to ensure there is no overwatering and that optimum moisture levels for plant health are continuously provided.

So when the club was looking to achieve an even higher level of accuracy to record water consumption for irrigation requirements, as well as wanting to implement remote control, Waterfield Solutions were approached. Their proposal was to upgrade the existing Rain Bird irrigation control system and allow stations to run simultaneously to enable watering to be carried out as efficiently as possible, both pre-match and at half time.

The existing system and pump capacity could not handle that requirement and a new inverter controlled pump set was required. As more accurate records of how much water was being used were also needed, the installation of Rain Bird's ESP-LXME controller with IQ-Cloud provided the solution.

This facilitates remote real time management of the irrigation system through the addition of a communication cartridge to the controller, enabling employment of IQ-Cloud's full suite of remote water management tools over the internet, including accurate monitoring and adjustment of irrigation levels.These readings allow Head Groundsman John Ledwidge to have a clearer understanding of the needs and outputs of the irrigation system.

Rain Bird says the functionality of IQ-Cloud, which includes the collation of data from local weather stations, is an extremely useful tool and suggests what irrigation levels will be appropriate for the prevailing and predicted conditions.

“We find the IQ-Cloud system reliable and accurately records information. We now have the facility to quantify and manage irrigation applications precisely and to monitor the exact amount of water used, so accurate budgets can be worked out, ” says John.