Irrigation Leak Repair Redwood City, CA

Timing tells the story. Redwood City's My Water portal shows your usage hour by hour — if the flow spikes only when the irrigation controller runs, the leak is outside. You can confirm at the meter: shut off the irrigation branch at its valve and watch whether the meter's low-flow indicator stops moving while the house supply stays on.

Summer watering legitimately raises usage — but a broken lateral line or a valve stuck partly open can double or triple what the watering should cost, and it hides inside the increase you were expecting anyway. Compare your hourly pattern in the My Water portal against your controller schedule: flow outside the scheduled windows, or one zone using far more than the others, means something is broken.

Yes. We isolate zones one at a time, pressure-test each run, and use acoustic listening and line tracing to mark the break before a shovel comes out. Most irrigation repairs open one small section of soil or turf — not a trench across the lawn.

Then we will find that instead — the same isolation process separates the house supply, the irrigation branch and the main line between the meter and the house. A main line leak is more urgent than a sprinkler break because it runs around the clock, and we will tell you plainly which one you have before quoting anything.

We repair the plumbing side of the system — valves that stick or weep, cracked lateral lines, broken risers and heads, and leaking connections at the backflow preventer and manifold. If the problem turns out to be controller programming rather than a leak, we will show you that as well; a system running twice a night looks exactly like a leak on the bill.

Detection follows our standard ranges — a basic inspection typically runs $100–$300, electronic detection $300–$800, and underground locating $500–$1,200 when a line has to be traced. The repair itself is quoted as a range once the break is marked, and most single-break repairs are small excavation jobs, not landscape projects.

Yes — the meter separates the house from the yard. With every fixture inside off, note the meter's low-flow indicator, then run one irrigation zone at a time and watch how the reading behaves. Movement with all zones off points at the irrigation main or a weeping valve; a zone that races the meter far beyond its normal pace usually has the break. The City's My Water portal also lets you set usage alerts, and a Redwood City homeowner has documented catching a broken irrigation line early in exactly this way — a spike flagged before the yard flooded.

More than most people expect, because irrigation runs on a timer whether anyone is watching or not. In one documented Redwood City case, a garden hose left running for two to three days added about $200 to the bill — and a broken line on a daily watering cycle repeats that waste every single day until it is fixed. It is also why a summer bill spike deserves a meter check before it is blamed on thirsty landscaping.