The other half is a licensed irrigator’s job, and the difference is usually decidable in ninety seconds at the valve box. This site is built to tell you which one you have before anybody is sent out — and to put you in touch with a licensed Texas irrigator working your part of the metro when it turns out to be the second one.
Houston Sprinkler Fix is a referral service. It does not perform, and does not offer to perform, irrigation work. Texas licenses landscape irrigators individually, and every job is carried out by an independent irrigator under their own name and their own license number — which is why no license number appears anywhere on this site.
Dead zones · Backflow preventers and freeze damage · Line breaks · Controllers · Heads and coverage · Damage from pool, fence and foundation work
A referral site has an obvious incentive to make everything sound like a job for a professional. That incentive produces bad advice, and bad advice is easy to spot, so this site does the opposite. These four are genuinely worth twenty minutes of your own time, and if one of them is the whole problem you have saved a call-out fee:
A zone that will open by hand at the valve has a working valve and an electrical fault. A zone that will not is hydraulic. Two branches, ninety seconds, no tools. How to do it.
House quiet, low-flow indicator watched, irrigation isolation valve closed, indicator watched again. That single test rules irrigation in or out of a bill spike from the curb. The sequence.
A spray nozzle rotates on the stem; a rotor’s arc sets with a key on top. If a mower has knocked one round, that is the entire repair. What to look at.
A tripped garage GFCI, a rain sensor stuck wet, seasonal adjust left at zero, and a bypass switch somebody flipped. All four look exactly like a dead timer. In order.
What is not on that list: anything on the pressurized mainline, anything involving the backflow assembly, buried wire faults, and anything where the answer is “dig until you find it.” Those are where a licensed irrigator earns the money, and where getting it wrong costs more than the call would have.
“Zone four is dead,” “something is spraying the street,” “the bill doubled,” “water is coming out of the box.” The diagnosis is the irrigator’s job. The symptom and the nearest cross streets are what get the right person moving.
This metro is roughly ten thousand square miles and no irrigator covers it. Katy and Kingwood are fifty miles apart with the whole city in between, so coverage here is assigned area by area rather than pretended at.
What failed, what it costs, whether the diagnostic is credited, and the irrigator’s Texas license number on the paperwork. All four are ordinary things to ask for and all four are cheap to check.
A solenoid, a wire splice or a valve diaphragm. The bleed-screw test separates the two branches before anyone brings a shovel. Dead zone.
Wet all the time means the pressurized mainline and means shutting it off first. Wet only while one zone runs is a lateral, and it can wait. Which one.
A spit at start-up is the assembly working. Continuous discharge is a rebuild. A split casting after January is the most expensive repair on the site. Backflow.
A weeping valve running twenty-four hours a day beats a dramatic geyser for total water, and produces no symptom anyone would photograph. Reading the meter.
A whole system silent after a fence or pool job is almost always one severed common wire. 811 does not mark private sprinkler pipe or zone wire. Construction damage.
A pressure spike, twice a night, all season. The noise is the symptom; fatigued fittings and a mainline break next spring are the consequence. Water hammer.
The backflow prevention assembly has to sit above ground and above the highest sprinkler head to work at all, which makes it the only part of a Houston irrigation system a freeze can reach. It is brass, it is full of water, and when that water freezes and expands the casting splits — classically through the domed bonnet on top, the most exposed part of the assembly.
This metro produced hard freezes in February 2021, December 2022, January 2024 and January 2025. Replacing a cracked assembly is the highest-ticket routine repair in residential irrigation. Wrapping one properly costs about fifteen dollars and takes ten minutes, and the only reason it does not get done is that November is when nobody is thinking about it.
Four steps, none of which is a compressed-air blow-out.
Drain first. Wrapping a full assembly protects the water that cracks it.
What to shut off, and what a metro-wide queue does to lead times.
The number the rest of the freeze section exists to argue against.
Most of this metro sits on expansive Beaumont clay, and everybody who lives here knows it moves. What is less obvious is that irrigation systems fail from it in a specific, mechanical way that has nothing to do with the house.
The soil rises and falls through the year, and it does so unevenly across a single yard — ground under a bed edge, under a driveway apron and under open turf are on different schedules. Buried PVC is rigid. Given differential movement along its length it does not bend, it shears, and it shears at the fittings because that is where the section changes. Above ground, the same movement pushes heads out of grade and tips them off vertical, so a head set flush at installation is watering the curb three summers later without anyone having touched it.
Both have the same answer and it is a design answer rather than a repair one: flexible swing joints at every head instead of rigid threaded nipples, so the next season of movement bends something instead of breaking it. That is the change worth making while the ground is already open. The riser page covers it properly.
The same soil behavior under the slab is an entirely different problem with an entirely different repair — Sugar Land Foundation Repairs handles that end of it. Shared mechanism, almost nothing else in common.
Irrigation density does not follow population. It follows master-planned development, HOA landscape covenants and lot size, which is why the coverage below starts in Katy and Cypress rather than inside the Loop. Every address in the metro is covered; these are the ones with a page of their own because there is something specific to say about them.
For your own system, a homeowner may do a great deal — adjusting arcs, swapping a head, resetting a schedule, wrapping the backflow for winter. Texas regulates irrigation work as a licensed activity when it is done for somebody else, and that scope reaches repair, service and inspection rather than just installation. So the practical line is: on your own property, the accessible surface work is yours if you want it. Anything on the pressurized mainline, the backflow assembly or buried wire is where a licensed irrigator is worth the money regardless of what the rules require.
Because this site does not perform irrigation work and therefore has nothing to display. Texas licenses irrigators individually, and a number belongs on the paperwork of the person who actually does the job. Putting one here — or a “licensed and insured” badge implying one exists — would claim something untrue. Ask the irrigator who arrives for theirs; it is meant to be on the estimate and the invoice.
That depends on the water provider named on your bill, and across most of this metro that is a municipal utility district rather than a city. Two houses on the same street can sit in different districts with different drought stages and different rules. Any site that published one metro-wide watering schedule would be wrong for most of its readers, so this one does not.
It depends on the zone and the season, and honesty here is more useful than a promise. February and October have slack. July and August do not. The week after a hard freeze is the worst in the year, because every unprotected assembly in the metro failed on the same night. What is always true: if the problem is on the mainline, closing the irrigation isolation valve stops the meter and removes the urgency entirely.
That is genuinely all it takes. The symptom and the nearest cross streets are enough to get you to a licensed Texas irrigator working your part of the Houston metro.
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