Irrigation & Sprinkler Systems in Bellevue, WA

Yes. Bellevue is a member of the Cascade Water Alliance, the regional wholesale supplier serving several Eastside cities, rather than being on Seattle Public Utilities like the city gardens we work in. The practical consequence for a homeowner is that conservation programmes, rate structures and any restrictions are set through a different arrangement. Because those change and we would rather not publish a figure that goes stale, we design for lower consumption directly — proper zoning, drip on beds, weather-responsive control — which saves more reliably than any programme.

More than most existing systems have, and the count is set by what needs different treatment rather than by area. Lawn and planted beds must be separate — they want different volumes on different frequencies. Beyond that, split by aspect where a garden has a hot west-facing side and a shaded north one, by elevation on a sloped lot, and separately again for containers, which dry out far faster than anything in the ground. On a large property that frequently means six to ten zones where an original builder system had three.

Repair and rezone first, in most cases — it is usually the better value and we will say so. Buried pipework that is sound has decades of life in it, and most of what makes an old system perform badly is above ground or in the logic: heads at the wrong spacing, zones that mix planting types, a controller nobody has touched since installation, and no seasonal adjustment. Reworking those is a fraction of a new install. What justifies replacement is genuinely failed pipe, undersized mains, or a garden layout that has changed so completely the old routes are irrelevant.

Almost always head spacing. Sprinkler coverage is designed head-to-head, meaning the throw from each head should reach the next one — so the areas between them receive water from two directions and the coverage evens out. Where heads are spaced too far apart, the midpoints get a fraction of the water the edges do, and those become the dry patches no amount of extra run time fixes, because extending the cycle just over-waters everything else. It is a design fault rather than a maintenance one, and correcting spacing is what solves it.