Keeping it Green

Welcome back one and all, and I see we have made it to another Friday, woohoo!! As the end of the month is upon us, so comes to a close our South Florida rainy season. I am taking off my “house” hat for a few minutes and wandering out in the yard to talk about your lawn sprinkler system. If you recall from last week, we discussed how complex the plumbing system can be in a typical home. The plumbing for a sprinkler system can be just as complex and also comes with some unique challenges of its own.

Let’s first start with the water supply itself, some systems are fed from a lake or canal, others from a well, and the vast majorities are fed from your cities water supply. For those of you that are paying for the water to keep everything nice and green, this is where sprinkler maintenance can give you the greatest money savings benefits. Think about this for a minute, ever been in a pouring rain storm and driven by a yard that had the sprinklers running? My personal favorite is when I see the streets getting a good healthy watering!! These things can be corrected with proper adjustment of the sprinkler heads and adding a simple rain sensor to the system.

Another very important component of the sprinkler system is the zoning and time clock. Larger yards require zoning as the system cannot provide enough water to turn on all the areas at one time; it just cannot generate enough pressure to do so. If the zoning is off it can result in under watering of the area due to low pressure. If the time clock is off or is set incorrectly you can end up watering your lawn at 4:00 pm during the hottest time of the day. In that case much of the water just gets whisked away by evaporation and can’t really do the job you want it to.

Again, just like our example house from last week, it is not uncommon to have 200+ connections in any lawn sprinkler system. So we have many potential places that you could be wasting water. Do you have any specialty landscaping that needs certain treatment? There exist many different types of sprinkler heads that can be utilized to make the water spray in different ways, lengths and patterns. As always, my recommendation would be to have one of our sprinkler techs come to your home and perform a maintenance check on your lawn’s sprinkler system. He’ll check the clock, all the zones, the pump if you have one, and give you an in depth report of the overall condition of the system and any improvements that might be needed. He will also show you the regular maintenance options we have available to keep your castle’s landscaping as green and lush as it can be. As usual, if you mention this blog post to your sprinkler tech, the basic maintenance plan is on me for the first year, happy watering.

House (or Lawn) Whisperer out!