The narrow case: one trench, one post hole, one auger bit, one severed line. It is the cheapest problem on this part of the site and the easiest to repair badly — and the difference between a good repair and a bad one shows up two seasons later, long after everyone involved has forgotten the day it happened.
The zone runs, but water goes into the ground rather than to the heads. Symptoms: heads beyond the cut lift weakly or not at all, a wet or boggy patch that appears only while that zone is on, and sometimes soil pushed up out of the turf. The zone works, badly.
The zone does not run at all. No water, no noise, nothing — identical to a failed solenoid, which is why so many of these get diagnosed as a valve problem. The tell is timing: a zone that worked the week before the digging and not the week after is a wire until proven otherwise.
And if the common wire was cut rather than a zone wire, every station on the system goes dead at once while the controller carries on as normal. A whole system that died the day after fence posts went in is that, essentially every time.
Repairing cut PVC is ordinary work: expose it, cut back to sound pipe, and join with couplings, allowing for cure time before pressure returns. Nothing about it is controversial.
The wire is where repairs go wrong, and it is worth being specific because it is cheap to get right. A buried low-voltage splice lives permanently in wet soil. Connectors intended for a dry indoor junction box — the standard twist-on caps — will work perfectly for one season and corrode through in two or three, and the failure looks exactly like a dead solenoid all over again. Direct-burial connectors, the gel- or grease-filled kind, are made for this and cost a couple of dollars. That is the whole difference between a repair and a repeat visit.
The best answer is inside a valve box, where it can be found. A splice buried in open ground is invisible to the next person, and on a twenty-year-old system with several of them, tracing a fault means excavating the yard rather than lifting a lid.
Pipe that was cut because it was shallow will be cut again for the same reason. A repair is the one moment when a shallow run can be reset lower without any extra excavation, and it costs nothing but the decision.
If the digging was recent and the trench line is visible, the search area is a strip rather than a yard, and the repair is straightforward. It gets harder when the work was months ago, or when the crew backfilled and re-sodded, or when the property changed hands in between.
At that point the approach is the same as any buried break: run each zone in turn, watch the behavior, bracket the fault to one lateral and one run between two heads, and where the route is unknown, trace it. On a cut wire, a wire tracer follows the conductor to the break directly, which is considerably faster than digging along a guess. In Houston clay a wet spot means very little about where the break is — water travels along the trench bedding and surfaces wherever it can — so tracing beats intuition here more than it would elsewhere.
They can, and plenty do a perfectly adequate job on a straightforward pipe repair. Two cautions. A crew whose trade is fencing or paving will typically splice wire with whatever is in the van, which is the connector problem above. And a repair by the party that caused the damage sometimes complicates the conversation about what else was affected. A written scope from an irrigator costs little and settles both.
Different, and usually simpler. A single dead head with the rest of the zone working is normally a crushed head, a blocked nozzle or a broken riser at that head rather than a cut line — a cut lateral takes out everything downstream of it, not one head in the middle. Worth checking before assuming the worst.
The sod above the repair has to come up, but it does not have to be destroyed. Lifting it in pieces with a spade and putting it back after backfilling gives a scar that knits in over a growing season. It is a five-minute difference on the day and a season's difference to the lawn, and it is worth asking for explicitly.
Solvent-welded PVC needs a genuinely dry joint and time to cure before pressure returns. In practice that often means a repair done in the afternoon is pressure-tested rather than put straight back into a watering schedule, and a repair done in wet ground may be finished the following morning. An irrigator who insists on that is doing it properly.
The ninety-second test that separates a wire fault from a valve fault.
Locating a break under clay, and mainline against lateral.
Why 811 does not mark this, and what to do before work starts.
Line repairs and wire fault tracing, priced separately.
The cheap version of this problem, if it is repaired properly. Say what was being dug and which zones stopped, and where in the metro the property is.
Call (346) 605-8787 Describe the Problem
Houston