Almost nobody gets through a pool installation with an intact irrigation system, and almost nobody is told that in advance. It is not a reflection on the pool builder — the work genuinely cannot be done without crossing and excavating the ground the system is buried in. What matters is understanding it before the deck is poured, because a great deal becomes permanent at that point.
Excavation for the shell, trenching for pool plumbing and electrical, and the equipment pad all cross the back yard. Whatever was buried there is now in pieces, and the pieces are under a spoil pile.
Low-voltage wire is thinner than the pipe and gets cut more easily and noticed less. A field that ran fine before the build comes back with two zones dead and no visible reason, because the break is a clean cut under three feet of backfill.
The genuinely expensive one. A valve box that ends up under a poured concrete deck or under a raised patio is not a repair, it is a relocation — the valves have to be moved to accessible ground and the mainline and wiring re-run to reach them. Discovered before the pour, it is an hour of work. Discovered afterwards, it is a very different conversation.
This is the one people do not think of as damage at all. A back-yard zone laid out for a rectangle of turf now serves a rectangle that is sixty per cent water and decking. The heads that used to cover the middle of it now spray into the pool and across the coping, and the strip of grass left along the fence is watered by whatever happens to reach it.
Almost everything else can be sorted out afterwards. These two cannot, or not cheaply.
Anything that will ever need servicing has to remain reachable without breaking concrete. Valve boxes, the backflow assembly and any isolation valve. Walk the deck outline with the plan before it is formed and check what is inside it.
If pipe or wire has to cross to the far side of the pool, a length of larger-diameter pipe laid as a sleeve before the pour costs almost nothing and makes that crossing possible forever. Without it, the only routes are round the whole pool or through the concrete. This is the single cheapest thing on this page and the most frequently omitted.
Both of these are conversations with the pool builder, and both land better before signing than during construction. A builder who is willing to lay a sleeve and keep the valve boxes clear of the deck is doing something genuinely useful for a trivial cost.
The sequence that works: wait until the build is finished and the ground is back to final grade, then pressurize the system and run every zone with someone watching. That produces a list — which zones are dead, which leak, which now water concrete — instead of a series of guesses. Repairing anything while a crew is still driving across the yard is buying the work twice.
The list then splits in two. The repairs are cut pipe, cut wire, crushed heads and buried boxes, and they are ordinary work. The redesign is the part that is easy to skip and expensive to skip: capping heads that now point at water, re-nozzling or relocating the ones that remain so the surviving turf actually gets covered, and putting the new planting beds around the deck on drip rather than spray. A system that is repaired but not redesigned works perfectly and waters the pool.
One exception to waiting: if a mainline was cut, the water is running continuously at street pressure. Close the irrigation isolation valve and the wait costs nothing.
Sometimes, and the contract is what says so. Many pool agreements in this region specifically exclude underground irrigation and landscape lighting from the builder's responsibility, which is a defensible position given that nobody can locate private lines reliably. Others include a nominal allowance. Reading that paragraph before signing is the single most useful thing on this page, because afterwards the position is fixed.
It wastes metered water and it puts irrigation water — which carries whatever is in the soil and the fertiliser — onto coping and into a balanced body of water. Neither is catastrophic and neither is free. The more practical objection is what it implies: a head aimed at the pool is a head not covering grass, so somewhere else in that zone is dry.
It is better than burying it outright and it is worse than not doing it. An access hatch in a pool deck is a permanent trip and drainage detail, it collects water, and servicing a valve through it is awkward enough that maintenance gets deferred. Relocating the manifold to soft ground during construction is almost always the better answer.
It varies more than any other job on this site, because it depends on how much of the system was in the footprint. A back yard where the pool took one zone and clipped a lateral is modest. A build that buried the manifold, cut the mainline and deleted half the lawn is a several-zone rebuild. What makes the number predictable is having the system run and listed after the build rather than estimated during it.
The narrow version: a single trench and a single break.
Why the new planting round a pool belongs on drip, not spray.
Locating and repairing what the excavator went through.
Running every zone afterwards to find what is actually wrong.
The useful call is after final grade, not during the build. Say how many zones are affected, whether the valve boxes are still reachable, and where in the metro the property is.
Call (346) 605-8787 Describe the Problem
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