Artificial Turf Installation in Seattle

The turf itself does — modern backings are perforated and pass water at a rate far above anything our rainfall produces. The failures happen underneath. If turf is laid over unimproved glacial till, the water passes straight through the backing and then stops dead on the hardpan, so it sits in a shallow reservoir under your lawn. That is what causes the soggy feel, the smell in pet installs and the slow settlement. A base built as a drainage layer rather than just a flat surface is the whole job. Where a lot also takes runoff from uphill, we drain it before laying anything.

It is safe, and whether it smells is entirely down to the install rather than the product. Urine passes through a permeable backing into the base; if that base drains and is periodically rinsed, there is nothing to hold odour. If it sits on compacted soil, the liquid has nowhere to go and the smell is inevitable. For dog owners we specify a permeable backing, an infill that does not retain ammonia the way older sand-only fills did, and enough drainage depth for a dog that uses the same corner every day. A hose-down every few weeks in summer is the only maintenance.

A well-installed turf on a proper base is generally good for fifteen to twenty years of domestic use, and Seattle is genuinely kind to it — the thing that ages turf fastest is intense UV, and we get less of it than almost anywhere in the country. The two things that shorten its life are both install faults: an inadequate base that lets the surface become uneven, and skipping the infill so the pile flattens permanently under foot traffic. Fibres do soften over time in high-traffic routes; brushing the pile up once or twice a year keeps that at bay.

It does get warmer than grass in direct sun, and this is one of the few areas where Seattle simply has less of a problem than a Phoenix or a Denver. On our handful of genuinely hot days a turf lawn in full sun will be noticeably warm underfoot in the early afternoon and back to comfortable by evening. Where it matters — a dog that lies out on it, or a play area in an unshaded south-facing garden — the practical answers are a lighter-coloured infill, some shade planting or a structure over part of it, and a hose-down that drops the temperature within a minute.

Sometimes, and we will tell you when. If your garden gets four or more hours of direct sun, drains reasonably, and the problem is that the lawn has been neglected rather than that it is in the wrong place, then aeration, top-dressing, overseeding and a proper feeding regime will get you a good lawn for a fraction of the cost of turf. Where that advice does not apply is the classic Seattle shaded north-facing garden or the dog run — those have usually already been reseeded two or three times, and no amount of seed changes the light.