Almost every irrigation system we open in Marin or Sonoma is watering correctly for a yard that no longer exists. Beds have matured, shrubs have grown across the spray, a tree now shades half a lawn, and the controller is still running the schedule somebody set the summer it was installed. The result is a bill that goes up while the yard gets patchier, and it is fixable without replacing the system.
The first change is zoning. A lawn and a shrub bed have completely different water needs — grass wants frequent, shallow, even coverage; established shrubs want deep and infrequent — and yet in most tract housing they share a valve. That guarantees one of the two is wrong on every cycle, and the way homeowners usually resolve it is by running long enough to keep the grass alive, which drowns the beds. Splitting them onto their own zones is often a half-day of work at the manifold and it changes everything downstream of it.
The second is drip. Spray heads throwing water over a hedge lose a large share of it to evaporation and wind before it ever lands, and what does land mostly wets leaves rather than roots. Drip line laid at the base of beds, borders and hedges puts water into the soil where the roots are, at a rate the ground can absorb instead of shedding as run-off down the driveway. It is the single biggest reduction available on a bed-heavy yard.
The third is a weather-based controller. A conventional timer runs the same minutes in November as in July because it has no idea what the weather is doing. A smart controller pulls local evapotranspiration data and adjusts every zone daily — skipping after rain, cutting back through the fog months, running fully in the heat. It also tells you from your phone when a zone is drawing wrong, which is how most people find a leak now instead of on the next bill.
Before any of that, though, run your system and watch it. Turn each zone on and stand in the yard. You are looking for heads spraying the fence, the sidewalk or the house; a head that has sunk below the grass and is watering its own crater; misting, which means the pressure is too high and you are paying to make fog; and any zone that leaves a puddle after it shuts off, which is a valve not seating. Every one of those is a cheap fix and every one of them is costing you money right now.
What people expect from this work is a lower bill. What they usually report is a better-looking yard as well, because most brown patches in a Bay Area lawn are coverage problems that were being masked by watering everything for longer.
Santiago's Contractors installs, repairs and upgrades irrigation across Marin, the East Bay, San Francisco and southern Sonoma. Call (415) 377-3889 for a free assessment.