The short answer
Find five things in the first week: the controller, the irrigation shutoff, the backflow assembly, the valve boxes, and the rain sensor if there is one. Then set the controller to Off, run every zone manually one at a time, and walk the yard while each one runs. Rebuild the schedule from scratch for the current season and your city's watering days. A system that comes on when you press a button has not been checked; it has only been proven to have power.
Closing paperwork covers the roof, the HVAC, and the foundation. The sprinkler system usually gets a line or two, if it gets anything. Then one afternoon in the first hot month you notice a brown stripe across the front yard, or a puddle that never dries, and you realize you own a buried mechanical system you have never seen and nobody explained.
This page is the orientation nobody gave you. It is written for DFW, where the clay soil, the twice-weekly watering rules, and the way builders install systems all change the answers.
What to Do the First Week
Five steps, none of which require tools or money.
- Set the controller to Off until you have had a look. Nothing is lost by pausing it, and you do not want it running a stranger's schedule while you figure the yard out.
- Find the irrigation shutoff and make sure you can turn it by hand. This is the one thing on this list that matters at 11pm.
- Walk the yard and find the valve boxes. Mark them so you can find them again after the grass grows.
- Run each zone manually, one at a time, and walk the yard while it runs. Write down what you see.
- Build a fresh schedule for the current season and your city's assigned watering days, then save it.
That is the whole first week. Everything below is detail on those five.
The Five Things to Find
1. The Controller
The controller is the box that decides when the system runs. People call it the clock, the timer, or the panel. In DFW it is usually mounted inside the garage, sometimes in a laundry room or utility closet, and sometimes in a weather-resistant case on an exterior wall.
Open the door and photograph three things: the face of the controller, the model number on the sticker or the back of the door, and whatever is written inside the door. Installers often tape a zone list in there, and a faded strip of masking tape that says "4 = back fence" is worth more than anything you will find online.
Common brands here are Hunter, Rain Bird, Rachio, Hydrawise, Irritrol, and Toro. The model number is what lets anyone, including us over the phone, tell you which buttons do what. Our controller programming guide covers the terms that are the same on every brand: program, start time, run time, water days.
2. The Irrigation Shutoff
Your sprinkler system has its own water shutoff, separate from the house. Closing it stops the sprinklers without cutting water to your showers. It is almost always a lever-handle ball valve at the backflow assembly, which is either in a box near the water meter or mounted above ground against the house.
Go find it on a calm afternoon, not during a failure. Two things to check while you are down there: that the handle actually turns by hand, and that it has not rusted off entirely, which is common on older DFW homes. If you cannot turn it, that is worth fixing now, because the day a valve sticks open is the day you need it. The full walkthrough, including the three backflow types we see here and where each one hides, is in how to shut the water off fast.
3. The Backflow Assembly
Same hardware as above, different reason to care. The backflow assembly is the code-required device that keeps irrigation water from flowing backward into the drinking water supply. Three types show up in DFW: an in-ground double check near the meter, or an above-ground pressure vacuum breaker or reduced pressure assembly against the house.
Which one you have matters for freeze season. The in-ground ones are generally fine. The above-ground ones are the part of a DFW system that a hard freeze actually destroys, and wrapping one takes ten minutes. See protecting your backflow preventer from freezing.
4. The Valve Boxes
Valves are what actually open and close each zone. They sit in buried boxes under round or rectangular lids, usually green or black, set flush with the grade. They tend to come in groups, often near the front corners of the house, along a fence line, or in a bed.
Walk the yard and find them. Mark each one with something you will still recognize in six months, a paver, a plant, a note on your phone with a photo of the spot. Then read why valve box maintenance matters, because a box full of dirt is a repair that costs more than it should.
If the count does not add up, boxes that should exist and do not appear anywhere, they are probably buried. That happens constantly on resales: sod goes down over a lid, a bed gets expanded, grade gets raised. Finding those takes a locator, which is covered in finding and repairing buried irrigation valves.
5. The Rain Sensor, If There Is One
Look for a small device on an eave, a fence post, or a gutter edge, wired back toward the controller. If there is one, note it, and assume nothing about whether it still works. Rain sensors have a service life, and a dead one either stops the system permanently or stops doing anything at all. Smart controllers do this part over the internet instead, which is its own set of questions covered in the smart controller guide.
Your agent may still have a line to the sellers. Four questions are worth asking before that door closes: who installed or last worked on the system, is there an as-built drawing or zone list, has anything been repaired in the last few years, and is any zone known not to work. Answers to those save real money. No answers is useful too, because then you know the whole system is unmapped.
The Previous Owner's Schedule Is Almost Certainly Wrong
Here is the single most reliable fact about an inherited controller: it is still running whatever was programmed the last time somebody paid attention. That might have been two owners ago. It was set for a different season, for a yard that has since gained a fence and lost a tree, and sometimes it was set to work around a problem rather than fix one. A zone cut to three minutes because it floods the driveway is a very common piece of inherited programming.
So do this in order:
- Photograph what is programmed first. Every zone, every start time, every run time, every water day. You are not keeping it, you are keeping the record. It tells you what somebody thought the yard needed, and a zone set to half the run time of its neighbors is a clue.
- Set it to Off or Rain Mode while you work through the yard.
- Build it fresh. Not adjusted. Fresh.
A DFW schedule is not one number. It changes by season, by head type, and by what the city lets you do. The two guides that cover it properly are the DFW seasonal watering schedule, which has the actual runtime numbers month by month, and how to build a sprinkler watering schedule, which walks through turning those numbers into controller settings.
Check your city's watering days before you set start times. Most cities in the North Texas Municipal Water District area run twice-weekly schedules with assigned days by address, and the specifics vary city to city and change with drought stage. Look up your own city's water conservation or code enforcement page rather than trusting the previous owner's days, because their days may not even be your days.
Run Every Zone and Watch It
This is the highest-value hour you will spend on the system, and it costs nothing. Use the manual or test function on the controller to run one zone at a time, then walk the yard while it runs. Here is what you are looking for.
What a healthy zone looks like
- Every head pops up to full height and retracts when the zone ends
- Spray patterns overlap, so water from one head reaches the next
- Nothing is watering the street, the driveway, the fence, or the house
- No head is misting into a fine fog, which means the pressure is too high
- Water soaks in instead of running downhill
What to write down
- Heads that do not pop up, or pop up crooked
- A geyser instead of a spray pattern, which is a broken nozzle or riser
- Heads buried below the grass line, spitting into the turf
- Dry corners and brown stripes, which are coverage gaps, not thirst
- Water pooling in one spot, especially against the house
- A zone number on the controller that does nothing at all
As you go, sketch the yard and number the zones. It does not have to be good. A phone photo of a napkin with "1 front, 2 front beds, 3 side, 4 back" written on it is a real asset the first time something breaks.
Three of those findings have their own guides: a geyser is covered in sprinkler shooting water up instead of spraying, heads swallowed by turf in pop-up heads blocked by vegetation, and rotors watering the pavement in how to adjust your rotors. A zone that is completely dead is its own diagnostic.
What Inherited Systems Commonly Hide
None of this is unusual and none of it means you bought a bad house. It is just what a decade or two of ownership does to a buried system.
Builder-grade parts. A cheap install and a good install look identical on day one, because the difference is underground. Thin-wall pipe, no swing joints, heads spaced too far apart, valves with no serviceable parts. On a resale you find out when things start failing in clusters. The ten-second checks that expose it are in builder-grade vs quality sprinkler systems.
Buried or lost valve boxes. The most common hidden cost on a new purchase. Sod, mulch, raised beds, and artificial turf all go over lids, and then a straightforward valve repair has to start with finding the valve, which is a separate job with its own price.
Abandoned zones. A wire breaks or a valve fails, somebody decides that zone was not important, and it quietly stops existing. The number stays on the controller. The landscape it used to water either died or is being covered by a neighboring zone that is now running longer than it should.
Coverage gaps from later landscaping. A fence went in, a bed got widened, a tree matured and now blocks two heads. The system was designed for a yard that no longer exists. Hydrozoning explains why mixing plant types on one zone fails, and mixing rotors and sprays explains the single most common design error, which is easy to spot once you know to look.
Drip nobody mentioned. Beds and tree rings often have drip tubing that is invisible from the surface and may have been cut by a landscaper years ago. If a bed looks stressed while the lawn looks fine, drip line repair is the place to start.
Age. PVC underground lasts decades. Spray heads last 5 to 10 years, rotors 7 to 15, valves 10 to 20 with rebuilds. If the house is 18 years old and nothing has been touched, several categories are due at once. The full breakdown is in the typical life span of a sprinkler system.
What the Paperwork Probably Did Not Cover
Two documents are sitting in your closing folder, and it is worth knowing exactly what each one is and is not.
Your inspection report. Find the irrigation section. On a lot of reports there is not one, or it notes the system as not inspected. If you are unsure what was actually done, ask the inspector two direct questions: did you run every zone, and did you look at the backflow assembly. Those are fair questions, and the answers tell you how much of the system is still unknown. If it was a visual check only, treat the system as unverified.
The seller's disclosure. It records what the seller knew, not what is true. A seller who never dug in the yard and never opened a valve box can answer every question honestly and still leave you with a broken zone. Read it as one person's memory rather than a test result.
The practical takeaway
Whatever the paperwork says, the hour you spend running every zone yourself is better evidence than any of it, because it is current and it is specific to the yard you now own.
Backflow and Your City's Rules
Irrigation systems in Texas are required to have a backflow prevention assembly, and some DFW cities require that assembly to be tested periodically, with the results filed. Whether yours does, how often, and whether a new owner inherits a due date are all city-specific, so call your city's water department or read their irrigation page rather than assuming. If a test is required, it is performed by a licensed backflow assembly tester. We repair backflow assemblies; we do not test or certify them.
Two other city-level things to know as a new owner:
- Hiring someone for irrigation work in Texas means hiring a licensed irrigator. The work is regulated by TCEQ, and many cities also require a permit for new installs. If you are hiring, how to vet and hire an irrigation contractor in DFW covers verifying a TCEQ license in about a minute.
- Winter here is not winter up north. No compressed air blowout, no draining the lines. DFW winterization is protecting an exposed backflow and making sure the controller is not watering into a freeze. See how to winterize a sprinkler system in North Texas.
What a First Visit Gives You
If you would rather not spend the hour, or you ran the zones and came away with a list you do not want to interpret, there are two different things you can book, and they are not the same product.
A diagnostic visit is for a specific problem. A zone is dead, something is leaking, the controller shows a fault. It starts at $75 when you schedule ahead, and the booking page shows the exact price for the slot you pick before you pay anything. The fee covers the trip and the initial assessment of what you point us at. Finding buried valves with a locator and tracing a wire break are separate jobs with their own flat-rate prices, quoted on site.
A system assessment is for exactly your situation: you do not have one problem, you have an unmapped system. Every zone gets run, every head looked at, findings written down, and you get a zone map so you know what waters what. That is the difference between owning a system and owning a mystery. It is bundled for new homeowners on our service packages page, which shows current pricing.
Either way, the person who shows up is a TCEQ Licensed Irrigator (LI0023963) and a Texas Certified Landscape Irrigation Auditor, certified through a WaterSense labeled program run by Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service. The auditor side is the part that matters on an inherited system, because the question is not just what is broken, it is whether the design was ever right. All repair work carries a 3-year warranty on parts and labor.
We do not run free inspections. A free inspection still costs the company money to perform, and that money comes back out of the repair quote. Charging for the look is how the repair pricing stays honest.
One last thing worth asking for on either visit: have the controller labeled and the zone numbers written where you will see them. It takes a few minutes and it is the difference between a system you can describe over the phone and one you cannot. If you would rather the seasonal adjustments just be somebody else's job from here on, our maintenance plans cover that. Call (469) 209-4110 if you would rather talk it through than read any more.