Questions People Actually Ask

On your own property a homeowner may do a great deal — adjust arcs, swap a head, reset a schedule, wrap the backflow assembly for winter. Texas regulates irrigation work as a licensed activity when it is done for somebody else, and the scope reaches repair, service and inspection rather than only installation. The practical line: accessible surface work on your own system is yours if you want it; anything on the pressurized mainline, on the backflow assembly, or involving buried wire is where a licensed irrigator earns the call regardless.

Because this site does not perform irrigation work, so there is nothing for it to display. Texas licenses irrigators individually and the number belongs on the paperwork of the person doing the job. A number 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.

It 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 under different drought stages. Any site publishing one metro-wide watering calendar would be wrong for most of its readers, so this one does not. Find the provider on the bill; it is the authority.

Also a water provider question rather than a metro-wide one, and the providers here do not all take the same position. If a test is required, ask whoever repairs the system whether they also hold the tester license — having both done on one visit saves a second call-out.

It depends on the zone and the season. February and October have slack in the schedule; 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 the same night. One thing is always true: if the fault is on the mainline, closing the irrigation isolation valve stops the meter and removes the urgency entirely.

In most Houston winters, yes, and it is the simplest safe answer. A dormant lawn needs very little, and a system that is shut down and drained cannot be caught out by the next freeze. The whole shutdown is four steps and takes an afternoon.

Almost always a severed common wire. One shared common returns from every valve to the controller, so cutting it silences every station at once while the controller carries on running its programme perfectly. And the 811 locate does not mark private irrigation pipe or low-voltage wire, so nobody flagged it before the auger went in.

In this metro the useful feature is cycle-and-soak rather than weather forecasting. Beaumont clay accepts water at a small fraction of an inch per hour, so a single long run time mostly runs into the street; splitting it into shorter passes with a soak between puts far more water into the root zone. Set the soil type to clay rather than leaving it on the default, or the feature does nothing.

Almost always repair, and this surprises people. The buried PVC — the expensive, disruptive part — typically has decades left. What ages out is everything accessible: heads, nozzles, solenoids, the controller and the backflow assembly. Replacing those on an existing pipe network costs a fraction of a new installation and gets most of the benefit.

The contractor first, in writing. Beyond that, the license is held by the individual irrigator and the state agency that issues it takes complaints about licensed work — which is another reason to have the license number on the paperwork before anyone starts. This site makes the introduction; it is not a party to the contract and does not hold the license.

The content here is built around repair and diagnosis because that is where the searches and the urgency are. An irrigator who repairs systems generally installs them too, so a new-system conversation is a reasonable thing to start with a call — it is simply not what this site is written about.

No. Everything routes through the contact form or the phone number, which is a deliberate choice about how enquiries are tracked and answered rather than an oversight. The form reaches the same place and produces a written record of what was asked.