The Advantages of Hiring Professionals to Install Sprinklers

It is perfectly possible to install a sprinkler system yourself. It is also possible to wire your own panel, frame your own basement and rebuild your own engine. The question is not whether DIY can be done — it is whether DIY is the right answer for a system you will rely on for fifteen years.

Design

A professional designer walks the property, measures water pressure at the source, calculates head spacing for proper overlap, zones intelligently around planting, and sizes pipe so that flow stays within manufacturer specifications. Most DIY installs miss at least one of these — usually pressure or spacing — and the lawn shows it within a year.

Installation

Pro Green crews use trenchless pipe-pulling machines that lay line underground with almost no impact on existing sod. DIY installation typically means open trenching, weeks of recovery for the lawn, and visible scars at the edges of beds. Our crews finish most properties in one to two days; a DIY install often runs a long weekend or several.

Components

Retail-shelf parts are designed to a price point. Contractor-grade Hunter and Rain Bird parts are designed for serviceability and longevity. The difference is invisible on day one and obvious by year three.

Warranty and service

A professional install carries workmanship warranty (Pro Green's is five years) on top of manufacturer parts warranties. If anything goes wrong, the same crew returns. A DIY install carries no warranty at all and most contractors will not service a system they did not install.

Final cost

Once you add a few weekends of your time, a return trip for parts, the lawn-recovery cost and the early failures of retail-shelf components, the “savings” of DIY often disappear by year four. A professional install costs more on day one and considerably less over a decade.