Irrigation & Sprinkler Systems in Seattle

For established, well-chosen planting, often not. For anything in its first two or three years, for lawns, and for containers, the answer is usually yes — and the reason is the shape of our rainfall rather than its total. Nearly all of the 38 inches falls between October and March, and July and August routinely go weeks without meaningful rain. That dry window lands precisely when plants are transpiring hardest and when new roots have not reached far enough to find moisture. A garden that looks effortless in May is the one that had water in August.

Both, on separate zones, in most gardens. Sprinklers are the right tool for lawns and turf, where you need even coverage across an open area, and they need head-to-head spacing to avoid the dry patches that plague badly designed systems. Drip is the right tool for everything planted, because it puts water at the root, loses almost nothing to evaporation, and keeps foliage dry — which matters more in a damp climate than a dry one, since wet leaves overnight is how a lot of fungal problems start here. The mistake we most often correct is a single system doing both jobs on one schedule.

Not usually in a normal year, but conservation is genuinely part of the picture and worth designing for. Seattle Public Utilities does not impose routine summer restrictions in a typical year, though voluntary curtailment is common in a dry August and regional conservation messaging runs through the Saving Water Partnership. Several Eastside cities — Bellevue, Redmond, Issaquah, Sammamish and Kirkland among them — buy their supply through the Cascade Water Alliance, and their conservation programmes and rate structures differ. Rather than quote a programme that may change, we design for lower consumption: correct zoning, drip on beds and weather-responsive control.

Yes, and skipping it is a gamble people lose roughly one winter in three. Our winters are mild on average, which is exactly what makes them dangerous — systems get left charged because it rarely freezes hard, and then a cold snap arrives, water expands in a backflow device or an above-ground component, and something cracks. The damage is not discovered until spring startup, by which point it may have been leaking underground for weeks. Blowing the lines out with compressed air in October is an inexpensive annual job and it is the difference between a system that lasts twenty years and one that needs repairs every other spring.