The most expensive single repair on a residential irrigation system in this metro is not caused by summer. It is caused by one night in January, it happens to thousands of houses simultaneously, and it is almost entirely preventable with ten minutes of work and about fifteen dollars of materials in November.
Every other water-carrying part of a sprinkler system is buried. Ground temperature at pipe depth on the upper Gulf Coast does not approach freezing even during a severe event, so laterals, mainline and valves come through a hard freeze untouched. One component does not: the backflow prevention assembly, which has to stand above ground and above the highest head in order to function at all.
It is brass or bronze, it is full of water, and it is standing in the wind. When that water freezes it expands by roughly a tenth of its volume, and a sealed metal casting has nowhere to put that. The result is a split — classically through the domed bonnet on top of a pressure vacuum breaker, because that is the most exposed part of the assembly and the least tolerant of ice.
Nothing about that is unusual or unlucky. It is what happens to an unprotected assembly in a hard freeze, every time, which is why a metro-wide freeze produces a metro-wide wave of identical failures rather than a scattering of bad luck.
Houston is not a cold-climate market, and that is precisely the problem: hard freezes are infrequent enough that many systems are never protected and frequent enough that the bill comes due regularly. February 2021 was the severe case, with days rather than hours below freezing across the whole region. December 2022 brought another hard freeze just before Christmas. January 2024 and January 2025 each delivered a Gulf Coast freeze event severe enough to matter to exposed plumbing.
Four events in five winters, on a component that fails the first time it is caught unprotected. Anyone who has owned a Houston house through that run and never lost a backflow assembly either wrapped it or got lucky.
The whole job, in order: shut off, drain the assembly, insulate, and put the controller somewhere it will not run a zone onto a road at two in the morning. October and November work.
The specific ten-minute part — what actually insulates, what only looks like it does, and the mistake that traps water inside the very thing being protected.
Northern systems get blown out with an air compressor every autumn. Houston systems do not and should not, and understanding why is what tells you which parts actually need protecting.
What to look at, in what order, once temperatures come back up — including the two failures that do not show themselves until the system is pressurized again.
Water pouring from a split casting, or a system that will not hold pressure. What to shut off first, whether it can be repaired, and what happens to lead times when the whole metro calls at once.
The single highest-ticket repair in residential irrigation, broken into parts, labour, assembly type and the testing some water providers require afterwards.
Freeze protection is October and November work, not January work. Two reasons, and the second is the one people underestimate.
The obvious one is that a forecast gives a few days of warning and hardware stores in this metro sell out of pipe insulation within hours of a freeze watch being issued. The less obvious one is that October and November are the genuinely quiet stretch in the Houston irrigation year — the heat has broken, nothing is failing, and an irrigator has time. A wrap job scheduled in November is easy to book. The same call on the Thursday before a Sunday freeze is competing with the entire metro.
Freeze work splits into two very different calls: a cheap one before, and an expensive one after. Say which one this is and where in the metro the property is.
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