It doesn’t take a hard freeze to crack a pipe. Even a single cold night can be enough to damage an irrigation system that hasn’t been prepped for winter, and repairs are a lot more expensive than prevention. If you haven’t thought about your sprinkler system since summer, now’s the time.
Why Freezing Water Causes So Much Damage
Water expands when it freezes. If there’s still water sitting in your irrigation lines, valves, or backflow preventer when temperatures drop, that expansion can crack pipes, split fittings, and damage the backflow device itself. None of that shows up until spring, when you turn the system back on and find out what didn’t survive winter.
What Winterizing Actually Involves
A proper winterization isn’t just shutting off the water at the source. It typically means:
- Shutting off the main water supply to the irrigation system
- Draining or blowing out the lines so no water is left sitting in the pipes
- Insulating the backflow preventer, which is one of the most vulnerable and expensive parts to replace
- Powering down the controller or adjusting it to a winter setting so it’s not trying to run a system with no water flowing
Skipping any one of these steps still leaves you exposed. A drained system with an uninsulated backflow preventer, for example, can still crack in a hard freeze.
Signs Your System Wasn’t Properly Winterized Last Year
- Water pooling around a valve box or backflow device after the ground thaws
- Zones that don’t pressurize properly when you turn the system back on in spring
- Visible cracks or damage on exposed piping or fittings
- A noticeably higher water bill once you start running the system again
Don’t Wait for the First Cold Snap
Once a hard freeze is in the forecast, it’s already tight timing to get everything shut down and drained properly. Getting ahead of it now means one less thing to worry about when the temperature drops.
Ashton Walden Turf Services can handle your winterization from start to finish, so your system is ready to go the moment spring comes back around. Contact us to schedule your irrigation winterization before the first freeze hits.