The short answer
Every cheap fix lives in the week before the excavator arrives. Locate the system, cap the zones the pool erases at proper fittings, reroute the mainline and wire around the footprint while the yard is open dirt, and lay sleeves under everything that will be concrete. After the deck pour, all four of those become expensive or impossible.
Here is the honest pattern from the repair side of pool season: we almost never get the call before the excavator arrives. We get it after, when the pool is beautiful, the deck is poured, and the sprinkler system is a casualty nobody planned for. Leaks on every zone that still has landscape to water. Wires cut somewhere under the new hardscape. Heads spraying against coping. And in the worst cases, a strip of living yard on the far side of the pool that no pipe can ever reach again.
None of that is the pool builder's job to prevent. Their contract is the pool. The irrigation system is yours, and the window to protect it is entirely before the dig.
Three Ways a Pool Takes Out a Sprinkler System
The dig itself. The shell excavation is the obvious one: everything inside the dig footprint, pipe, wire, heads, valves, is simply gone. This part is unavoidable and honestly the least troublesome, because at least it is visible and everyone knows it happened.
The equipment path. Excavators, skid steers, and concrete trucks cross the rest of the yard for weeks, and irrigation pipe sits inches under turf. Track equipment crushes laterals and mainlines far from the pool itself, which is why post-pool systems so often leak in places that look untouched. This is the damage nobody attributes to the pool, and it shows up as mystery leaks zone after zone.
The concrete. Decking, coping, and equipment pads seal whatever they cover. A cut line under new deck is not repairable, a wire path under it cannot be re-dug, and a section of yard on the far side of a wraparound deck can end up with no legal route for pipe to reach it at all.
The pool does not kill the whole sprinkler system. It kills the middle of it, drives over the rest, and then seals the evidence under the deck. The zones you still need are the ones that got hurt.
The Real Problem: The Zones That Survive
A pool replaces turf, so it genuinely removes some of your watering needs. If the whole backyard became pool and deck, this would be simple. It almost never is. There are still beds along the fence, trees, a side yard, a strip of lawn out front of the coping, and those areas still need water after the project, from a system whose pipes and wires used to run through what is now a hole.
That is the job we walk into after the fact: one real project where the zones that still had vegetation to water were leaking everywhere, wires were cut, and the system needed rerouting to serve what was left of the landscape. That work is all doable, but doing it after the deck exists means working around concrete that did not have to be in the way, and in some yards there is so much of it that parts of the landscape simply cannot be reached again. Those homeowners did not lose their irrigation to the pool. They lost it to the missing planning week.
The Week Before the Dig
Four decisions, all cheap before the excavator and all expensive or impossible after.
Locate the system. A pre-dig locate marks the mainline, flags the heads, and finds the valves across the work area and the equipment path. Scope honesty: laterals cannot be traced by any tool, but head and valve positions show where they run, and the high-consequence targets, the mainline and valve boxes, get marked precisely. The excavation and access plan should start from that map. Details on our valve locating page.
Decide what dies and cap it properly. Zones inside the pool footprint get cut and capped at the right place, back at a fitting outside the construction zone, not wherever the excavator happened to tear them. Proper caps mean the surviving system holds pressure through construction instead of bleeding into the dig.
Reroute before the pour, not after. If the mainline or valve wiring crosses the pool footprint, it gets rerouted around it while the yard is still open dirt. The same trench work after the deck exists costs multiples and sometimes is not possible at all.
Lay sleeves under everything that will be concrete. This is the highest-value line on this page. A sleeve is just oversized pipe placed in the dirt before a deck or walkway is poured, a pathway that future irrigation pipe and wire can pass through. Sleeves cost almost nothing while the ground is open, and pool builders will happily set them if someone tells them where. With sleeves, the far side of the pool stays reachable forever. Without them, concrete is a wall, and the difference is one conversation held one week early.
Tell the pool builder: "Before any flatwork is poured, I want irrigation sleeves under the deck at the points my irrigator marks." That sentence is the difference between a system that can grow with the yard and a backyard that can never be piped again.
If the Pool Is Already In
If you are reading this with the pool finished and the system limping, here is the recovery path.
Pressure-test what is left. Construction-crushed pipe leaks in places that look untouched, so the first step is walking every surviving zone and finding what the equipment path did. Expect the damage to be spread wider than the pool area.
Trace the wire. If zones will not run, the wire path likely crossed the construction area. Breaks are traced electronically and spliced where accessible; where the old path is under concrete, the wire gets rerun along a new route.
Reroute to serve what remains. The surviving landscape gets mapped against reachable routes, and the system is rebuilt to serve it, new pipe around the hardscape, valves relocated where they can be serviced. If parts of the yard sit beyond unbroken concrete with no sleeves, we will tell you straight: some of those areas may only be reachable by drip irrigation fed from an accessible side, and a few may not be reachable at all. That honesty up front beats discovering it invoice by invoice.
If the deck is not poured yet, stop. Even mid-project, the sleeve conversation is still available right up until the concrete truck arrives. If flatwork is still ahead of you, make the call this week, not after.