Freeze in the forecast and you are not winterized yet?
Call. Do not wait for the morning. A hard freeze is several hours below about 25 degrees, and that is enough to do real damage to a system still holding water.
If you cannot get anyone out in time, shut the water off to the system at the main valve inside, open the test cocks and the bleed on the backflow so the brass can drain, and wrap the whole assembly in a blanket or a towel inside a bag. That is not winterizing. It is buying the backflow a night.
- It is not automatically ruined. A short freeze that lifted by morning often does nothing, especially if the ground had not cooled yet.
- It is still worth blowing out. Winter is long, and the next freeze is the one that finishes what the first one started.
- If something already cracked, finding it now beats finding it in April with the water on and nobody home.
Do not just blow it out. Know what you are putting to bed.
A compressor and forty minutes is the easy part.
The blowout is the one time a year somebody looks at every zone
Running a system zone by zone with air is the same walk as running it with water. Heads that will not seat, a zone that has been weak all summer, a valve that is slow to close, a head somebody mowed off in July, a wet spot that has been there since June. All of it shows during a blowout if the person doing it is paying attention.
Most of it costs nothing to note and it lands on your list for spring instead of surprising you in April, which is the month every irrigation company in Denver is already booked solid.
Not sure your system was properly shut down last year?
It is a fair question and it is hard to answer from the outside. Air pressure that was too high can wreck seals without cracking anything visible. A zone that got skipped holds water all winter and nobody knows until it fails. If you inherited the house, or the last outfit was quick about it, that is worth a look.
HOA common areas, and systems with more zones than a house
Common-area irrigation is a different job from a driveway and a strip of lawn. More zones, longer mainline, more backflows, and often nobody on the board is certain how many zones there actually are or where all of them are.
We do the walk as part of the work rather than treating it as a separate charge, so the association ends up knowing what it owns instead of guessing at it next spring.
Two-wire and decoder systems too. A large property may run one pair of wires to the whole site rather than one per zone. That changes how the system is shut down and how faults get found. There is a separate page on two-wire and decoder systems.
Get on the list
The calendar fills before the weather turns. Call or text and we will get you scheduled.
- Roughly how many zones, if you know
- Whether it is a house, an association, or a commercial property
- Anything that has been wrong with the system this season
- Whether it has already been through a freeze
- Whether anyone has been digging in the yard since the last blowout
Denver and the metro, including Aurora, Lakewood, Arvada, Westminster, Thornton, Centennial, Littleton, Englewood, Wheat Ridge and Commerce City, out to Longmont, Broomfield, Parker, Castle Rock and Highlands Ranch.
If something is already wrong with the system
Losing water with no wet spot, a zone that will not build pressure, or a problem somebody already came out for and did not solve. That is a different job and it has its own page: sprinkler leak detection and diagnostics.
If a crew dug in your yard over the winter
A dry system hides that damage completely, and there is no way to test for it without putting the water back in. It shows up at spring startup instead. Worth reading the page on fiber and utility crew damage before then, because the paperwork is easier if it starts early.