Sprinkler System Installation

The design matters more than the hardware

Most of what separates a system you never think about from one you fight with every summer is decided before anything goes in the ground. Lawn and garden beds do not want the same amount of water, and a bed in full afternoon sun does not want the same as one on the north side of the house.

So the property gets split into zones that can run on their own schedules. Grass on rotors or rotary nozzles, beds on drip or micro-spray where that suits the planting, and heads placed so their spray patterns overlap rather than leave dry crescents between them.

What the install day looks like

• The layout is walked and marked with you before a trench is opened.
• Lines are pulled in, heads set to finished grade, and valves grouped where they can be reached again.
• The controller is mounted, zones are programmed, and every zone is run in front of you.
• Turf is put back. On an established lawn the trench lines close over within a few weeks.

Questions worth asking any installer

How many zones, and why that many. Where the valves are and how they are reached. What happens at the property line and around existing trees. Whether the controller can be adjusted without a service call. Ask us the same questions — the answers should be specific to your yard, not generic.

Before the first winter, and every winter after

A new system joins a yearly cycle the day it goes in: a fall blowout before the freeze and a spring startup once the ground has thawed. In town, the ground and the season change enough to be worth their own page: sprinkler system installation in Collingwood. If the sprinklers are going in as part of a wider job, the sequencing is on the landscape installation page, because trenching once for irrigation and lighting together is cheaper than trenching twice.