The team · Outdoors & land
Irrigation & sprinklers
A sprinkler system is easy to install and easy to forget, until a skipped winter service cracks a pipe.
What they install and service
An irrigation contractor installs a full underground watering system: pipes buried below the lawn, sprinkler heads or drip lines depending on whether you are watering open lawn or planted beds, valves that control separate zones, and a controller that runs the whole schedule automatically. The same trade also services systems already in the ground, which is a large and genuinely ongoing part of the business even where no new installation is ever planned.
The seasonal service side matters just as much as the install, arguably more, over the full life of the system. In spring, the system gets turned back on, tested zone by zone, and adjusted for anything that shifted over winter, a head knocked out of alignment by frost heave, a valve that needs attention after sitting unused for months. In fall, before the first hard freeze arrives, the water has to be cleared out of the lines entirely, since standing water that freezes inside a buried pipe or a valve can crack it from the inside where nobody can see it happening.
These two visits are usually sold and billed separately from any repair work, and a system installed by one company is very commonly serviced by another entirely, there is no requirement to use the original installer for ongoing service. It is worth comparing service pricing on its own rather than assuming you are stuck with whoever happened to put the system in originally, especially if that company has since raised its rates or slowed down its response time.
A newer layer of this trade worth knowing about is smart control, systems that check local weather or soil moisture and skip a scheduled watering when it clearly is not needed. Not every installer offers it, and not every yard needs it, but it is worth asking about if you want to spend less time adjusting a schedule by hand through the season.
When you need one, and how this goes wrong
Install when you are landscaping a yard from scratch, adding a new lawn area or a bed that needs its own dedicated watering zone, or simply tired of dragging hoses and sprinklers around by hand every summer evening. Service twice a year if a system already exists, in spring to turn it back on properly and in fall to clear it out completely, whether or not the same company handled the original install.
The most common and most expensive way this hire goes wrong is skipping the fall service entirely. Water left sitting in the lines over a hard winter expands as it freezes and can crack a pipe or split a valve underground, out of sight, so the damage is not obvious until the system is turned back on the following spring and water starts appearing somewhere it clearly should not be. That repair, and the cost of actually tracking down where along a buried line the break happened, is far more expensive than the routine service visit that would have prevented it in the first place.
The second common mistake is a controller left on a generic factory schedule long after installation, never touched again. A system that waters on a fixed timer regardless of actual rainfall wastes water on days it clearly is not needed, and it can overwater a bed of plants that need far less than a stretch of open lawn sitting right next to it. Ask whether the company can set up rain sensing or seasonal adjustment as part of the install or a service visit, and whether they will actually walk you through changing the schedule yourself rather than leaving it exactly as it was originally set.
A slower, quieter version of this same mistake is simply forgetting the system is running at all after a wet stretch of weather, and coming home to find beds soaked for a week straight because nobody adjusted anything. Walking the yard occasionally during the season, not just at opening and closing, catches problems a fixed schedule alone will not.
What drives the cost, and what to check
For an install, cost tracks the size of the yard and the number of separate zones it needs, more zones mean more valves, more wiring, and more controller capacity to manage them all. A simple, open lawn is the cheapest layout to cover. A yard with mixed beds, slopes, and different plant water needs requires more zones and different head or drip types for each one, which adds both material cost and real design time before anyone starts digging. Rocky or root filled ground slows the trenching considerably and raises labor cost regardless of how simple the design itself actually is.
For service, ask precisely what a spring or fall visit includes before you compare two quotes as if they were the same service. Some companies check and physically adjust every head and test every zone individually. Others simply turn the water on or off at the main valve and call the visit done. Those are very different amounts of actual work for a similar looking price, so ask before you assume either one.
One check that is easy to overlook entirely: a backflow device, which keeps water sitting in the irrigation lines from siphoning back into your drinking water supply, often needs periodic testing, and in many places that test has to be performed and certified by someone specifically qualified to do it. Ask whether your system has one installed, and whether your town requires that testing on a regular basis, since it is a genuine health and safety check, not an upsell tacked onto the invoice.
Repairs sit on their own scale entirely. A cracked pipe found early in spring is a modest fix, while a system that ran through a whole season with an undetected leak can waste a real amount of water and quietly raise a utility bill well before anyone traces the cause back to a single broken fitting buried underground. It is worth walking the yard occasionally during the season looking for a soggy patch that never quite dries out between waterings, since that is often the first visible sign of a leak, long before a water bill makes the problem obvious on paper. Replacing an aging controller is a smaller, worthwhile cost of its own, since an old unit with no rain skip feature at all tends to waste water every season it keeps running exactly as originally installed.
Keep exploring the team
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