Irrigation & Sprinkler Systems in Redmond, WA

Because it was designed for the garden the builder handed over, not the one you have now. A typical new-build system has three or four zones covering an open lawn and a token border, and it is laid out before any of the planting, patios or beds that follow. Once a garden gains structure, those original zones are watering across areas that need completely different treatment. The fix is usually rezoning rather than replacement — the buried pipework is often fine, and what needs changing is which heads belong to which circuit and how each one is scheduled.

Generally yes, and treating them the same is a common waste. Valley-floor ground near the Sammamish River sits close to a high water table, so plants there have access to moisture the upland does not — while Education Hill and Novelty Hill are on glacial till with normal summer drying. A property spanning both, or a garden designed with a valley-floor palette on upland soil, will have one area over-watered and the other stressed on a single schedule. Where a lot genuinely spans the transition, it is worth zoning across it.

Head-to-head spacing and a matched precipitation rate across the zone, both of which are design decisions rather than adjustments. Head-to-head means the throw from each sprinkler reaches the next, so the ground between them receives water from two directions — spacing them further apart to save on heads is the reason most large lawns have persistent dry patches. Matched precipitation means all heads on a zone apply water at the same rate, so mixing head types on one circuit produces over-watering at one end and under-watering at the other regardless of run time.

In this climate, genuinely yes, and more than in a dry one. Seattle-area summers are punctuated by rain in a way that a fixed schedule cannot account for, so a conventional timer keeps running through a wet week and then applies exactly the same volume during a dry one. A controller that skips or reduces a cycle based on actual conditions cuts consumption noticeably without any loss to the planting. It also removes the main practical failure of irrigation systems, which is that nobody adjusts the schedule between April and October.