Houston builds more swimming pools than almost anywhere in the country, replaces fences after every serious wind event, and underpins foundations on a scale few other metros match. All three involve digging in exactly the strip of ground where irrigation pipe and low-voltage zone wire run — and none of them are covered by the utility locating service people assume protects them.
Texas 811 exists to protect utility-owned facilities — gas, electric, water main, telecoms, up to the point where they become the property owner’s. Everything on the customer side of that line is private, and private facilities are not located by that call. Irrigation mainline, laterals, zone wiring, landscape lighting, pool bonding, gas runs to an outdoor kitchen: all of it is invisible to the locate, and all of it is in the top eighteen inches of a yard where every post hole and every trench goes.
Contractors know this. Homeowners generally do not, and the gap between those two facts is where most of the damage on these pages comes from. The locate tickets get called in, the paint marks appear on the grass, everybody proceeds in good faith, and the sprinkler mainline — which nobody marked, because nobody was going to — gets cut on the second morning.
The largest and most destructive of the three by a distance. Heavy equipment crosses the yard repeatedly, a large volume of soil is excavated and stockpiled, and the finished deck permanently covers ground that used to be lawn. Systems rarely survive it, and the right repair is usually a partial redesign rather than a patch.
The narrow case: one trench, one post hole, one auger, one severed pipe or wire. Cheap to repair and easy to get wrong — particularly when a cut zone wire gets spliced with the wrong connector and fails again two seasons later.
Both dig in a line, and in both cases the line follows exactly where irrigation was installed — round the perimeter of the slab, or along the property boundary. Foundation work adds a complication nothing else does: the soil around the house is deliberately disturbed, so heads and pipe move afterwards as well as during.
Retaining walls, patio extensions, tree removal and stump grinding, French drains, generator pads, playsets, outdoor kitchens. Same mechanism, same fix. Stump grinding deserves a specific mention because the grinder wanders sideways underground in a way nobody expects and takes out pipe several feet from the stump.
Every zone, running, with a phone. It takes twenty minutes, it establishes what worked before anyone arrived, and it is the only record most properties will ever have of where the heads are. As-built drawings for residential systems in this metro almost never survive a change of owner.
Flags or marking paint on every head, the valve boxes and the backflow, plus a best guess at the pipe runs between them. It is not a locate, but it is the difference between a crew that knows there is a system and a crew that finds out.
Most pool, fence and landscape contracts in this region contain a paragraph about underground irrigation and lighting, and a great many of them exclude it from the contractor’s responsibility. That is not necessarily unreasonable given the locate problem — but it is much better read before signing than after a mainline is cut.
It depends on what was signed, and that is genuinely the answer rather than an evasion — these contracts differ considerably. Where an exclusion is in the contract, it usually stands. Where there is no exclusion, the position is more open. Either way this is a contract question rather than an irrigation one, and the useful step is to read the agreement and, if the figure is significant, take proper advice about it. What an irrigator can supply is a written scope and price for the repair, which is the document any conversation about it will need.
Usually it should. Repairing a lateral while the same crew is still driving across the yard is buying the same repair twice. The exception is a mainline break, because that holds pressure permanently and runs the meter whether or not anyone is working — close the irrigation isolation valve and the wait becomes free.
Not by looking, generally. A cut zone wire and a cut pipe look identical from the surface, which is nothing. The practical sequence is to have the system pressurized and run zone by zone once the work is done and the ground is back to level — that produces a list rather than a guess, and it catches the damage that only shows itself under pressure.
Frequently not, and this is the part that gets missed. A zone designed for a 40-foot run of turf that now contains 15 feet of turf and 25 feet of deck is over-watering paving and under-watering what is left. That is a design correction rather than a repair, and doing it at the same time as the repairs is much cheaper than doing it later.
How a cut lateral or mainline actually gets located and repaired.
A severed zone wire presents exactly like a failed solenoid.
The zone-by-zone pass that turns a guess into a list.
What each of these repairs runs, for a conversation with a contractor.
Say what was done in the yard, which zones are affected, and roughly where in the metro the property is. A scoped, written repair price is usually the document the next conversation needs.
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