In 2007 we bought our first home, which had been built in 2004. The home inspection revealed poor water pressure in one sprinkler zone. A helpful customer service rep looked at the water bills and said, 'Holy cow!' What did that mean? The property should have used about 4,000 gallons of irrigation water a month—and it was using around 30,000! She also told me that the irrigation water bill was astronomical from day 1. A trust had been paying all the property bills for the very elderly couple we were buying from, so no one realized there was a problem.
When I started asking about property lines, I was met with 'rolling on the floor laughing'.... That was no help. I had visions of the entire front lawn being torn up looking for a leak, and worse, the shortest route from the distribution box to the zone went under the driveway—what a thought!
Eventually I was able to track down the company that had installed the irrigation systems in that area. A manager came and stood in the street in front of the house looking at the property. His first assurance was that they NEVER run the lines under the driveway, even if it's four times longer to go around the entire house. Whew!
He stared for a couple of minutes, grabbed a shovel from his truck, and dug up TWO spadefuls of soil, reached into the ground, and pulled up an irrigation line that simply ended underground, meaning the water ran like a hose. It had NEVER had a sprinkler on it! He installed a sprinkler, turned on the system, returned to the road, and stared some more.
He then went back to the same spot and dug up ONE more spadeful adjacent to the first hole, again reached into the ground, and pulled up another sprinkler line which did have a sprinkler head on it; it had just spent the preceding three years buried! He pulled the sprinkler up and set it level to the lawn, explaining to me that this second sprinkler was for the area immediately around the sprinkler, whereas the first one was an oscillating sprinkler doing one large segment of the lawn. Now the pressure was correct, and the water consumption dropped to what it should have been.
The man explained to me that when these systems are installed, it's done by eye; they don't work from a survey, and he wasn't even sure there was an accurate survey showing on the property itself. From what he had said, I was left with the impression that properties just flow into each other, that it's all approximate, and that finding an exact lot line would be difficult to impossible.
We considered this a builder's defect, authenticated by the very company that had installed the system. The Developer saw it as yet another thing to roll on the floor laughing. Their position was 'It went through your meter, you pay for it.' For us it was a nominal amount; we felt bad for the elderly folks whose trust had been paying that astronomical bill for three years!
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