What does head-to-head coverage mean?

It means each sprinkler throws far enough to reach the next head on the station. EPA WaterSense uses it as the target for even coverage. When one head falls short, a dry arc appears between them, and adding minutes floods the rest of the lawn instead of filling the gap.

Should I add minutes when one part of the lawn turns brown?

Not before checking the heads. A brown patch is usually a coverage fault: a sunken, tilted or clogged head, or a nozzle that does not match its neighbors. Extra time waters the healthy turf more and can push runoff onto paving while the dry patch stays dry.

Sprinkler Repair

Fix crooked heads, dry strips and spray that lands on concrete, then reset the timer to match.

Request an estimate(623) 292-2515

What a broken sprinkler looks like in a Surprise yard

Surprise has steered new subdivisions toward small lawns for years. The city code caps water-intensive landscaping on model homes in new single-family developments at 20 percent of the landscapable area, so a spray zone in a newer neighborhood is often a modest patch of grass ringed by rock, block wall and driveway. In that layout, sprinkler faults show up fast. A head knocked a few degrees off line throws water onto the drive. A head that sank behind the turf leaves a brown crescent by August.

Surprise treats both as more than cosmetic. The water conservation ordinance counts spray onto a sidewalk or street as water waste, names damaged spray heads and neglected timers as causes, and expects a known sprinkler defect to be repaired, with work beginning no later than 72 hours after the owner learns of it. Running a zone to find the fault is exempt; leaving it is not.

How the repair is done and checked

A repair starts at the controller, one station at a time, and walks from the valve to the last head. Each head is checked for height, plumb, nozzle type and arc. Heads on one station should share one nozzle family, because a fixed spray beside a rotating nozzle waters at a very different rate. Where a narrow strip next to a sidewalk can never hold spray, the honest fix is a different nozzle or drip, which is also what the city's watering guidelines point toward when they say sprinklers should serve only turf.

Water quality matters too. City of Surprise water is groundwater from the West Salt River Valley sub-basin, and its report lists calcium and magnesium hardness, so nozzles and screens collect mineral grit over the years. Cleaning or replacing them is part of the job. The visit ends with each head reaching the next, nothing landing on concrete, and the runtime cut back if minutes had been added to hide a weak head. See sprinkler head replacement and irrigation leak detection.

Source: Surprise Municipal Code, Chapter 58 Article VII, Water Conservation, Checked Oct 1, 2026