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Irrigation maintenance

EPA WaterSense reduces sprinkler maintenance to four steps: inspect for broken or tilted heads and pooling water, connect — check the joints between sprinklers and pipes and the pressure regulation, direct — aim heads at the landscape rather than the driveway with head-to-head coverage, and select — use a WaterSense labeled controller that adjusts to weather or soil moisture. Doing that once each spring catches most of what goes wrong, and it's the difference between a system that saves water and one that quietly wastes it.

The reason this matters financially is scale. WaterSense estimates about 50 percent of the water used for residential outdoor irrigation is wasted through overwatering and inefficiency, and that homes with clock-timer systems use around 50 percent more water outdoors than homes without irrigation. Nationally, residential outdoor use runs to nearly 8 billion gallons a day, mostly for landscape watering.

Do the can test at least once. WaterSense suggests placing empty tuna cans around the lawn while the system runs and timing how long it takes to collect half an inch. That gives you a real runtime for your actual heads instead of a number someone guessed, and it exposes zones with wildly uneven output.

Adjust programming with the season, not once a year. Landscapes typically need about an inch of water a week including rainfall, so the same schedule that's right in July is roughly double what's needed in May. This is exactly the chore a weather-based controller automates.

Beyond that: keep heads clear of grown-in turf and mulch, clean or replace clogged nozzles, check for misting (a sign of pressure that's too high, which wastes water as drift), and keep a written record of your zone map and schedule so the next contractor isn't starting blind.

How to choose

Run the four-step spring check
Inspect, connect, direct, select — EPA's own sequence. It takes an afternoon and catches most waste.
Do the can test to set runtimes
Tuna cans, half an inch, time it. Real data from your own heads beats any default schedule.
Reprogram seasonally
About an inch a week including rain is the general target. Adjust monthly, or let a WaterSense labeled controller do it.
Fix misting and drift
Fog instead of droplets means pressure is too high. Pressure-regulating heads or a regulator fixes it and cuts waste.
Keep a system file
Zone map, schedule, controller model, valve locations, backflow test dates. It saves diagnostic labor every single time.
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At minimum a spring startup check and a fall shutdown, plus a walk-through of each zone during the season. EPA's inspect-connect-direct-select routine is a good annual baseline.
Use the can test rather than a rule of thumb: place empty tuna cans in the zone, time how long it takes to put half an inch in them, and build your schedule from that. Landscapes generally need about an inch a week including rainfall.
Pressure is too high for the nozzles. Misting drifts away instead of landing on the lawn — it's pure waste and is fixed with pressure regulation.
Meaningfully. WaterSense estimates roughly half of residential outdoor irrigation water is wasted, and that a single broken head can cost up to 25,000 gallons and $280 across a six-month season.
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