Can A Tankless Pressure Pump Do Livestock and Irrigation At The Same Time?

“Can the TPP or Tankless Pressure Pump System, be used to water livestock and run sprinklers at the same time? If it could run sprinklers, how far away can I put the sprinklers before I impact the pump or the sprinkler?”

The great thing about the TPP system, which is a booster pump system, is that it automatically adapts to the amount of water demand. It adjusts the speed of the motor to maintain constant pressure and if the water demand increases, it simply increases the speed of the motor to match the amount of water needed. That’s great in this type of situation.

If your livestock are drinking and there’s a sprinkler running, your pump is going to run a little bit faster to make sure both are getting the water they need in this scenario. Let’s think we have a stock tank that’s plumbed into our TPP system and then we also have a solenoid valve and a sprinkler running off for the pasture. The cows could be drinking from a stock tank and when the water lowers and the float valve turns on, water is going to start flowing into the stock tank and the pump is going to automatically sense that and turn on in order to maintain constant pressure across the system.

While that stock tank is refilling, we could also have that solenoid valve turn on in a 10 gallon per minute sprinkler and start going in the pasture. The TPP is automatically going to ramp up in speed to make sure there’s enough water for the livestock trough and enough for the sprinkler system. When one turns off, the motor simply slows down because it can sense that water change and knows it doesn’t need to run as fast in order to maintain that constant pressure. The system automatically adapts to the amount of water being used at any given time. When everything turns off, the pump will sense that and shut down into low power mode. It continues to sit there and wait until it senses more water is needed before it turns back on.

The second part of that question is, “How far can I run my line over to my sprinklers without affecting performance?” That’s going to come down to the diameter of the pipe you’re running and the flow rate; the amount of water your sprinkles are using. We want to make sure the diameter of the pipe is large enough so there’s not too much frictional loss inside the pipe, so sprinklers aren’t getting sufficient pressure.

In general we probably run about a 1 inch line for most common sprinklers. If you have a sprinkler setup with three or four heads you might go to 1 1/4 in or 1 1/2 inch to make sure there’s enough flow through that pipe to get the water and the pressure over your sprinkler. One of the nice things about the TPP system is the pressure is adjustable, so if you’re finding you’re not quite getting enough pressure out of your sprinkler, you can go back to your pump and increase the pressure up to its maximum limit. A lot of times that’s going to increase the amount of water getting into your sprinkler and it might just make up for a slightly smaller pipe.