SprinklerSpring Start-Ups

A start-up is the appointment that sets up your whole season. Water has been out of those lines since fall, the controller has been dark for five months, and somewhere in the yard a head has been clipped by a mower or heaved by frost. The job is to find all of that before your lawn depends on it.

Timing matters more than people expect in eastern Nebraska. Charge the system while the ground is still frozen and any water left in a line has nowhere to go but through the pipe wall. We wait for the frost to clear, then open the main slowly — a gradual fill so the system pressurizes instead of getting hit with a water hammer that can crack fittings and blow seals.

From there it’s methodical: run every zone, watch every head, and look at what the water is actually doing. Heads that spray the driveway, a rotor that has stopped rotating, a zone that has lost pressure because of a leak underground — these are cheap to fix in April and expensive to discover in July when a brown stripe shows up in the lawn.

What's included

• Slow, controlled fill

  The main opens gradually so the system pressurizes without a water hammer that cracks fittings.

• Every zone run and watched

  Not a sample — each zone gets cycled and observed while it runs.

• Head adjustment

  Arcs and radii set so water lands on grass instead of the sidewalk, driveway, or street.

• Leak and break check

  Looking for pooling, soft spots, and pressure loss that point to a line or fitting that didn’t survive winter.

• Backflow inspection

  Visual check of the backflow assembly — the part that keeps irrigation water out of your drinking water.

• Controller programmed

  Schedule set for spring conditions, not the August schedule it was still holding from last year.