Case Study: Congressional Country Club

Part of the renovation for the greens was to install the SubAir system which allows us to pull water out of the greens when we get heavy rainfall and also allows us to blow air up through the green profile to help cool down the soil in the greens during the high-heat months of the summer. Looked at other varieties, other brands, but I guess because of my experience I felt most comfortable with going with that (SubAir) product.

Many times we’ll get one (heavy rain) at 3 o’clock in the afternoon and it will dump an inch and a half of rain, we’ll have puddles on the greens, and they’ll want to get back out there as quick as they can. We can actually remove that water by turning on that vacuum system so they can get back out there and not damage the greens walking through spongy, wet areas. And it’s important to get rid of any standing water as quickly as possible so that you don’t actually boil the roots.

We have sensors in the greens that connect to, and allowing it to communicate to the SubAir system and we can set parameters when we want it to remove water because we’re too wet or when we want to move air up into the canopy because there is a lack of oxygen. That gives us the ability to move that water out as quickly as possible.

When the product was delivered they had one of their installers come out and work with our contractor to make sure they were installed properly. Through researching I felt that they were the best company to go with and so far we’ve been very happy with the installation process. None of this is possible without having the right people, in the right places and we’re blessed in that we’ve got a great team. The people here are really excited about it giving us the opportunity to provide better putting conditions through those tough times of the year when that’s needed.

Joel Wyman – McDonald and Sons

We were hired to renovate the Blue Course greens to get ready for the 2011 US Open at Congressional. We are installing 19 buried vaults – one at the practice putting green. It’s been fun. It’s been my first experience with SubAir and I’ve learned a lot. We’ve had the guys from SubAir here three times to help us through the process. It’s pretty easy to install. They came out and they located the separators, the vaults and the bubble up sumps and we recorded them with a GPS system and they were locked in forever and ever. That one visit was very beneficial and we’ve kind of been on cruise control since then.