Check your city’s current watering guidance before setting a schedule — it changes year to year.
Farmington has irrigation systems from two eras and they need different things. In the newer subdivisions, systems were installed with the houses, laid out on paper, and the opportunity is mostly in control — getting a controller to water according to the weather and the soil instead of a fixed calendar. In the older core, systems were extended by hand over decades and the opportunity is in the hardware. Both conversations have become more pointed now that secondary water is metered in much of the area, because for the first time the cost of watering badly shows up on a bill.
When irrigation water was effectively unmetered, an inefficient system cost you a brown lawn in one corner and nothing else. With secondary water metered across much of the Weber Basin service area, overwatering has a price, and the biggest single source of waste is not a broken head — it is a schedule that waters the same minutes in May as in August.
The cheapest improvement available to most properties is therefore the controller, not the pipe. A controller that adjusts seasonally, or one that takes a weather feed or a soil moisture reading, will cut usage without any change in how the lawn looks, because most fixed schedules are set for the hottest fortnight of the year and then left alone for five months.
Check your city’s current watering guidance before setting any schedule, because it changes year to year and is not the same in every Davis County city. A contractor quoting a schedule without reference to it is guessing.
A smart controller is good at deciding when and how long to run a zone. It is not able to fix a zone that cannot deliver water evenly in the first place. Fitting one to a system with mismatched nozzles, a broken head and a zone that spans sun and shade will produce a well-scheduled version of the same uneven result, which is why the sequence matters: audit the system first, then automate it.
An audit is not elaborate. It means running each zone, measuring how evenly water lands across it, checking that every head is the right type for its arc, and separating areas that have genuinely different needs — lawn from beds, sun from shade, slope from flat. Those corrections are what make a smart controller worth its price.
Rain sensors and flow sensors are the two additions worth more than they cost. A rain sensor stops the obvious waste of watering during a storm. A flow sensor notices a broken lateral and shuts the zone down, which on a metered supply can pay for itself in a single failure.
In the older part of Farmington, systems have usually grown rather than been designed: a zone added when a patio went in, a line extended to a new bed, a valve relocated during a remodel. Nobody drew it and the person who did the work has moved on. The practical consequence is that a straightforward repair starts with locating things.
It is worth paying once to have the system mapped — valve boxes found and labeled, zones identified and written down, abandoned pipe noted. On a system that will be repaired several more times over the years, that map saves more than it costs the second time somebody has to find a valve.
The other common find in old systems is a backflow prevention arrangement that no longer meets requirements, or that was never right. Where irrigation connects to a culinary supply, backflow prevention is what keeps irrigation water out of the drinking water, and it is not a detail to leave to chance.
Usually yes, and often substantially, because most fixed schedules are set for the hottest two weeks of summer and then left that way for months. Now that secondary water is metered across much of the area, that waste has a price. The caveat is sequence: a controller schedules well but cannot make an uneven zone water evenly, so audit the system first and automate it second.
A rain sensor and a flow sensor. The rain sensor stops the obvious waste of running zones during a storm. The flow sensor notices a broken lateral and shuts that zone down, which on a metered supply can pay for itself the first time a line breaks while you are away. Both are modest additions relative to what they prevent.
By mapping it. Have the valve boxes located and labeled, the zones identified and written down, and abandoned pipe noted. On a system that will be repaired repeatedly over the years that map pays for itself the second time somebody has to find a valve. While that is being done, have the backflow prevention checked — on older systems it is often not what current requirements call for.
Describe the symptom and we will match you with an irrigation contractor who traces the actual cause before replacing anything.
Get an Irrigation Pro OutA rough description is plenty — we will follow up to narrow it down before anyone comes out.
