Why most irrigation installs fail within five years — and how to spot the ones that won't.

What a bad install looks like at year five

Before I explain what goes wrong at install, here's what the corner-cutting looks like by the time it's your problem. These are the systems I get called out to diagnose — five, seven, ten years after they were put in — and the original contractor is long gone or no longer in business. What I see, repeatedly:

• Brown spots and green spots in clearly-defined patterns. Zones that were undersized from day one now can't deliver adequate water under peak summer load. The homeowner has been watching the lawn get worse for years without understanding that the coverage gaps are from install, not from equipment failure.
• Heads in the wrong spots. Spray against structures. Rotors on zones that should have had spray. Heads too close to edges, too far from each other. Nothing actually fixes this — it's engineering that was wrong at layout.
• Valve manifolds that have to be excavated to service. Buried too deep, placed where grass has grown over them, or located in spots that collect water and corrode wiring. Every service call costs extra because of decisions made ten years ago.
• Splices that have been corroded for years. Wire connections that were never waterproofed properly, now showing intermittent zone failures, silver corrosion visible when I open the valve box.
• The wrong backflow preventer. Or the right one installed at the wrong height. Or one that was never permitted and has never been tested — and nobody from the city has noticed yet, but eventually will.
• No pressure regulation in a high-pressure area. Heads that are blowing out over time, spraying mist instead of streams, failing prematurely because they've been operating at 80 PSI when they were rated for 40.

None of that shows up in year one. In year one, everything works — water comes out, heads pop up, lawn gets green. The systematic failures only become visible as components age, loads increase, and the cumulative effect of shortcuts compounds. This is what makes cheap installs so seductive: the homeowner who saved $1,800 at purchase has no idea they're going to spend $4,000 to unwind it over the next decade.

The six corner-cutting failure modes

Every bad install I service shows some combination of these six things. Understanding what they are gives you the language to evaluate any bid you're considering.

1. Undersized pipe and inadequate hydraulic design Most common

The most widespread shortcut, because it's completely invisible. A properly-designed system calculates the gallons-per-minute each zone needs, sizes the pipe accordingly, and verifies the water supply can actually deliver that volume at adequate pressure. A cheap install skips the calculation entirely and uses the same pipe size everywhere — usually 1" poly or smaller PVC — regardless of what the zones need.

What this produces: zones that work fine in isolation but deliver poor coverage under real operating conditions, heads at the far end of each run that pop up only partially because pressure collapses along the undersized pipe, and the inability to ever add additional zones because the hydraulic headroom was exhausted at install.

2. Too few zones for the coverage area Fast money-saver

A properly-zoned system separates coverage areas by water demand, sun exposure, and plant type. Lawns get separate zones from flower beds. Sunny sides get separate zones from shaded sides. A system for a typical NRH quarter-acre lot should have 6-8 zones minimum for effective management; larger lots more.

Cheap installs combine zones aggressively to reduce valve count, wire runs, and labor. A four-zone install on a property that really needs eight means you can never water the front lawn differently from the flower beds, can never reduce shaded-side watering without also reducing sunny-side, and can never adjust for the lawn needing more water while the beds need less.

3. Wrong head types and mixed precipitation rates Coverage disaster

Fixed spray heads apply water at about 1.7 inches per hour. Rotor heads apply at about 0.6 inches per hour. MP rotators apply at about 0.4. If you mix these on the same zone — which is standard in careless installs — running the zone for enough time to cover the rotor areas floods the spray areas, and vice versa. You can't fix this by adjusting runtime. It's a design error.

A correct install uses a single head type per zone, or at minimum groups matched-precipitation heads. When I open an old controller and see notes like "zone 3 — run 30 minutes" while zone 3 has three different head types, I know the system has been overwatering the front lawn and underwatering the back beds for as long as it's been running.

4. Wire splices that aren't waterproof Silent killer

Every wire connection in the valve box needs to be waterproofed. The professional way: direct bury wire nuts with waterproof gel-filled caps (3M DBY-6 or equivalent), or heat-shrink waterproof connectors with adhesive lining. The cheap way: regular twist-on wire nuts with electrical tape over them, or — worse — just the wire nut.

Valve boxes fill with water periodically. Every time they do, untreated splices corrode a little more. Five years in, intermittent zone failures start. Seven years in, entire zones go dead and diagnosis requires excavating splices to find the corrosion. This single shortcut is responsible for thousands of dollars of unnecessary repair work across the thousands of residential systems in NRH.

5. Backflow preventer shortcuts Regulatory issue

In Texas, backflow preventers are required on every irrigation system and are legally regulated. Installation must be done by a licensed irrigator; the device must be permitted in most municipalities; and it must pass annual testing by a certified Backflow Prevention Assembly Tester. Corner-cutting here takes several forms: installing the wrong type for the application, installing it at the wrong height (Texas code requires specific elevations), not pulling a permit, or installing before the meter (which is illegal).

6. No pressure regulation where needed Silent damage

Municipal water supply pressure in NRH ranges from 60-90 PSI depending on the neighborhood and elevation. Most irrigation heads are designed to operate at 30-50 PSI. A proper install includes a pressure regulator where supply pressure exceeds head ratings, either at the system level or individually at heads in high-pressure zones.

Installs without pressure regulation produce "misting" — heads atomize water into fine spray that drifts on wind and evaporates before hitting the ground. You can see it from the sidewalk. It wastes water dramatically, reduces coverage, and accelerates head wear. On older installs, it's the single most common cause of needing full head replacement at the 10-year mark.

Check your actual bid — interactive evaluator

The questions below come from what I'd audit on any contractor's bid before recommending a homeowner sign it. Answer based on what your actual bid says — or doesn't say. The evaluator scores each answer and tells you whether you're looking at something trustworthy or something that needs more scrutiny.

The seven questions to ask before signing anything

These are the questions I'd ask if I were hiring an irrigation contractor and wasn't one myself. Ask all of them. Take notes on the answers. A contractor who can't answer confidently is one who hasn't thought carefully about your property — which means they'll make decisions on the fly during install, which is where the corner-cutting happens.

Why the cheapest bid is almost never the cheapest system

For a 6-8 zone residential system in NRH, realistic bid pricing from reputable contractors in 2026 runs roughly $3,200 to $5,500. Bids well below that range — say $2,200 — are signaling that someone is cutting corners to win the job. The savings at signature typically reverse themselves within five years through:

• Higher ongoing water bills from under-zoned systems forcing overwatering of low-need areas to hit high-need areas
• Early component replacement because heads were cheap, pressure was unregulated, or pipe was undersized
• Rework costs when the system can't be expanded because the hydraulic design left no headroom
• Diagnostic fees that are higher because valve manifolds weren't accessible or wiring wasn't traceable
• Complete replacement of critical components like backflow preventers installed incorrectly at the outset

Over a 10-year ownership period, the "cheap" install typically costs 40-60 percent more than the "expensive" one. The savings at signature are real — they just get repaid with interest later. For customers who know they're moving in 2-3 years, the math can work in favor of the cheap install (they won't own the problems). For long-term homeowners, it almost never does.

What a correctly-specified install looks like

For contrast, here's what I put on every bid I write. Not because I'm showing off — because every one of these items is what distinguishes a system that works correctly at year five from one that doesn't.

• Site walkthrough before quoting — no fixed-price estimates without measuring the property, evaluating soil, testing pressure, and looking at plantings
• Zone layout diagram included in the proposal, showing each zone's coverage area and reasoning
• Specific models for heads, valves, controller, and backflow preventer — no substitutions without written approval
• Pipe sizing calculated from the demand on each run, not one-size-everywhere
• Waterproof wire connections using 3M DBY-6 direct-bury wire nuts on every splice
• Pressure test at 100+ PSI for 30 minutes after assembly, before backfill
• Backflow permit pulled and BPAT inspection scheduled
• Two-year workmanship warranty plus manufacturer warranties on components
• Controller configuration complete with seasonal schedules programmed — not handed off as "here's the manual, figure it out"
• Walkthrough with homeowner on completion, explaining every component and the maintenance expectations

None of this is unusual. It's what the industry's professional standards call for. The reason it's unusual in practice is that most of it doesn't show up in year one, so most contractors skip the parts that don't produce visible day-one value.

A final note — I'm not the only contractor who does this right

The point of this article isn't "call me." There are other contractors in the Mid-Cities who install correctly. Some are expensive and charge correctly for their work. Some are new and still establishing themselves. The point of this article is that you should be able to tell who's who before you sign anything. The bid evaluator above, and the seven questions, are tools for that.

If you walk through those with every bid you're considering, the decision usually becomes clear — not "who's cheapest" but "who's answering the questions substantively and who's deflecting." The deflectors are almost always the five-year failures. The substantive answerers are almost always the ten-year-performing systems.

If you want me to look at your property and give you a substantive bid, I'm happy to. No obligation, no pressure, and I'll walk you through every one of the above items before quoting anything. If the bid I produce doesn't look better than the others you're considering, hire someone else.