Western Sydney Wanderers Centre of Football

Nine pitches at the Wanderers' training base are irrigated from harvested stormwater. Two FW150EX automatic filters at 200 micron keep the grit out of the valves and sprinkler heads.

The Centre of Football at Blacktown is the training base for the A-League's Western Sydney Wanderers, and also supports the club's women's and local academy teams. The 11-hectare development takes in nine football pitches, an academy facility with gymnasium, offices and a media centre.

Irrigation water is harvested stormwater run-off, collected and stored in a 1.5 ML underground tank.

Harvested stormwater is not clean water. It carries whatever it picked up on the way to the tank, and the system it feeds is full of the components that suffer most from grit: automatic valves and sprinkler heads across nine pitches. Blocked heads mean dry patches on a professional playing surface.

Two Filtaworx FW150EX automatic self-cleaning filters with 80 mesh (200 micron) screens, one on each of the site's two independent irrigation systems.

Each system runs a Triplex Lowara pumpset with 3 × 11 kW pumps, delivering 21 L/sec at 650 kPa into a Hunter fully automatic sprinkler system. The 80 mesh screens give the valves and sprinkler heads solid protection at that flow.

Filter controls are electric, with backwashing programmed on differential pressure at 50 kPa and a time option via the Filtron 1-10 controller.

The two systems operate independently, and the design includes a connection line between them — so if one system is down for maintenance or a fault, the other can carry the site.

System design was by Matthew Wilson of Total Irrigation Designers. Installation was by Paul Delaney of Australian Turf Projects.