Sprinkler Troubleshooting:
Check These First.

Walk to wherever your irrigation system ties into the water supply — usually a backflow preventer (a brass fixture with two ball valves on top, typically near the house or in a green box by the meter). Both handles should be parallel to the pipe to be open. If either one is perpendicular (sideways), the water is shut off to the system. This single check explains a surprising number of "nothing is working" calls — often after a freeze, a plumber visit, or yard work when someone closed the valve and forgot.

Takes: 30 seconds · Fixes: About 1 in 8 "no water" calls

Find your sprinkler controller (usually in the garage, sometimes in a utility closet or on an exterior wall). Look at the display and take a photo with your phone. A blank display means no power. An error code is the controller telling you exactly what it thinks is wrong. "RAIN DELAY" or "OFF" on the screen means the system is intentionally paused. If it shows the normal time and looks healthy, the problem is downstream of the controller — a valve, wire, or head — which narrows things significantly.

Takes: 1 minute · Pro tip: Text the photo to (817) 993-9306 — it's the fastest way to get a diagnosis

If the controller display is completely blank, your first suspect is a tripped GFCI (ground-fault) outlet. These are the outlets with the little RESET and TEST buttons, usually in bathrooms, kitchens, garages, and on exterior walls. One tripped GFCI can kill power to a whole chain of outlets — including the one feeding your sprinkler controller. Press RESET on every GFCI outlet in the house, then check if the controller display comes back. If it does, you just fixed the problem yourself.

Takes: 2 minutes · Fixes: A real number of "dead controller" calls — no charge, no visit

Most controllers have a MANUAL button. Use it to run each zone for about 2 minutes while you walk the yard and watch. You're looking for: zones that don't turn on at all; zones where the pressure is clearly weaker than others; broken heads geysering or stuck down; heads spraying the street, the fence, or nothing. Write down which zone numbers have which problems (or take a video). This zone-by-zone map is the single most useful piece of information you can give an irrigator before a visit — it turns a 60-minute diagnosis into a 10-minute confirmation.

Takes: 5–10 minutes · Makes: The repair visit dramatically faster

With the controller set to OFF (or unplugged), walk the yard and listen near each sprinkler valve box. If you hear water running, one of the valves is stuck open and you have a slow leak that's been feeding one zone continuously — almost certainly for days or weeks. This is the #1 cause of sudden water bill spikes on homes with irrigation systems. You can also confirm it by reading your water meter: with everything in the house off, the low-flow indicator on the meter (a small triangle or gear) should be completely still. If it's moving, water is leaking somewhere. Shut the irrigation supply valve off (Step 01 in reverse), and if the meter stops, you've isolated the leak to the sprinkler system. For the full diagnostic walkthrough on bill spikes, read the water bill article in the journal.

Takes: 5 minutes · Saves: Could save hundreds on next water bill if caught early

Once you've run through the checks above, text Landon a couple of photos and a quick summary of what you found. Something like: "Zone 4 wont come on, controller says OK, heard nothing at the valve box. Here's the controller, here's the head that used to spray that area."

Landon will usually reply within a couple of hours during business days with a likely diagnosis and a rough cost estimate. If it's something you can solve yourself, he'll tell you how and not charge a dime. If it needs a visit, he can come prepared with the right parts — which means the actual repair visit is faster and cheaper. And if it's an active emergency, he'll bump you up the schedule.

The whole checklist takes: About 10 minutes · The payoff: Either a free fix or a faster, cheaper visit