Utah is the second-driest state in the country and one of the highest per-capita water users, and a surprising share of the gap between those two facts is sitting in residential sprinkler systems that nobody has looked at closely in years. Here are the five problems we find most often, and how to check for each in an afternoon.
Mismatched heads on the same zone. Rotors and spray heads apply water at completely different rates. Put both on one valve and you either soak the spray area or starve the rotor area, and there is no runtime that fixes it. Run each zone and watch for heads that look obviously different from their neighbors.
Pressure that is too high. Water leaving a head at excessive pressure atomizes into fine mist, and mist blows away or evaporates before it lands. If your spray looks like fog rather than droplets, you are paying for water the lawn never receives. Pressure-regulated head bodies solve it at the head instead of by choking the whole zone.
Watering at the wrong time. Midday runtimes lose a meaningful fraction to evaporation and wind. Early morning, roughly between four and eight, puts water down when it is cool and still, and lets the blades dry before evening, which also cuts down on fungal problems.
Spray landing on hardscape. Walk the property while each zone runs and watch the driveway, the sidewalk, and the fence line. Every head throwing onto concrete is pure loss, and it is usually a five-minute fix with a nozzle change or a quarter turn on the arc.
Beds and trees on spray heads. Shrubs, perennials, and trees do not want overhead spray. Drip lines put the water at the root zone where it is used, cut evaporation dramatically, and keep foliage dry. Converting bed zones to drip is one of the highest-return changes on most systems.
One more, free: adjust the controller seasonally. A schedule that is right for late July is roughly double what the lawn needs in May and September. Many systems run one program all season simply because nobody ever went back and changed it.