Seasonal Irrigation Tune-Up in Surprise, Arizona

Surprise gives homeowners a ready-made calendar for a tune-up. The city's Landscape Watering Guidelines change the days between waterings four times a year, and each change is a natural point to walk the system and reset the controller.

The four Surprise seasons

The City of Surprise Landscape Watering Guidelines use four periods: March to May, May to October, October to December, and December to March. Desert-adapted trees, for instance, move from roughly every one to three weeks in the hot months to every one to two months in winter, while cool-season grass takes no water from May to October. The guidelines are advice, not a mandate, and they apply to established plants; new plantings and unusually hot, dry weather need more water, and cool or rainy spells need less. The Arizona Municipal Water Users Association also recommends adjusting schedules at least four times a year. A Surprise tune-up timed to those four changes keeps the controller in step with the table instead of leaving the summer program running into December.

What a fall or spring visit checks

Start with coverage. EPA WaterSense recommends looking for heads that do not pop up fully or that tilt, checking connections for leaks, and turning spray away from driveways, sidewalks and walls. Then the drip side: the city guidelines say to wet the entire depth and width of the root zone in every season, and University of Arizona Extension publication AZ1048 describes that root zone as one and a half to four times the width of the canopy. Emitters that still sit against the trunk of a maturing tree need moving outward. Probe the soil after a cycle with a long screwdriver or rod to see how deep the water went. Finally, the guidelines suggest watering twice as long once or twice a year to leach salts, which is easiest to schedule at a seasonal visit.

Winter is where the largest gap usually hides. From December to March the city table stretches desert-adapted shrubs to every 30 to 45 days and desert-adapted trees to every 30 to 60 days. A controller left on its fall program through January can water those plants several times more often than the guidance suggests, so the December visit is often where the biggest savings sit.

After the monsoon

The National Weather Service Phoenix office places the monsoon from June 15 to September 30, with downbursts strong enough to drop branches and shift heads. A tune-up in October is the time to straighten heads knocked off line, reconnect drip tubing moved by runoff, clear debris from valve boxes, and reset any controller that lost its clock during an outage. If the lawn is overseeded with winter grass, the city table waters cool-season grass on a very different schedule from warm-season grass, so the program changes again.

Keep it on the right side of the code

Section 58-658 of the Surprise water conservation code lists poorly maintained timers, laterals and pipes as causes of water waste. A tune-up that ends with no runoff and a current program is the simplest way to stay clear of it. The city also runs water-wise workshops, including Irrigation Efficiency and Irrigation Maintenance, Troubleshooting and Repair, listed on its conservation page. The general method is on the tune-up service page. See the Surprise watering guidelines explained and the monsoon controller settings guide. For controller faults found during the visit, go to controller repair in Surprise. All services are listed on the Surprise hub. For the cold months, read winter watering, frost and overseeding in Surprise.