Can an Irrigation Company Give Me a Price Over the Phone?

What you should be told on the call

For Irrigation Medics those answers are: $125 for the first hour on site, covering diagnosis plus repair time; $80 per hour after that, billed as worked; after-hours and emergency dispatch is port-to-port plus $125; parts are billed separately; and you get an estimate before work begins. Those are published numbers and there is no reason to be coy about them.

• The service call or diagnostic rate, and exactly what it covers.
• The hourly rate after that, and how partial hours are handled.
• Whether after-hours or weekend dispatch costs more, and how much.
• Whether parts are included or billed separately.
• Whether you get an estimate before work begins.
• General ranges for the repair your symptoms suggest, clearly described as ranges rather than quotes.

Why the repair itself cannot be priced blind

Consider the single most common call we get: one zone stopped working. Before anyone has looked at it, the plausible causes include a failed solenoid, a torn valve diaphragm, a broken station wire, a failed splice in a wet valve box, a controller output that has stopped producing voltage, a blown fuse, a valve buried and flooded, or a lateral line break bleeding off all the pressure.

Those range from a fifteen-minute part swap to a job that needs a wire locator and a couple of hours. Any number offered before the diagnosis is either a guess generous enough to cover the worst case — which means you overpay on the easy ones — or a low number that will be revised on arrival.

This is also why the diagnostic hour is genuinely productive rather than a gate fee. On most calls the fault is found and fixed inside it.

How to describe the problem so the phone estimate is useful

With those five facts a technician can usually tell you which of two or three scenarios you are probably in, and what each tends to cost. That is a far more useful answer than a single fabricated number.

1. Say which zones are affected. One zone, several zones, or everything. This single fact narrows the cause enormously — one zone is usually a valve or wire, everything is usually the controller or supply.
2. Say what the controller is doing. Does it have a display? Does it advance through zones? Does it show a fault or an error?
3. Say whether you see water. A wet spot, water bubbling up, a flooded valve box, or nothing visible at all.
4. Say whether anything was dug recently. Landscaping, fencing, a new mailbox, aeration, a utility trench. Recent digging changes the most likely cause immediately.
5. Say how many zones the system has, roughly. It is the best available proxy for how long anything on the system takes.

The numbers to be wary of

A flat quote for an undiagnosed underground fault is the main one. If a company will commit to a price for an underground leak repair without having seen the property, either they have padded it heavily or the number will change.

A very low advertised service call is the other. It is a legitimate business model when the rate is transparent and it is an honest first hour of work. It is not when the rate covers fifteen minutes and diagnosis is billed separately on top. The question that resolves it: "what exactly does that cover, and what is the hourly rate after it?"

Related answers

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Where we work

Irrigation Medics repairs irrigation systems across Hall County and the Lake Lanier communities, the Gwinnett corridor through Duluth, Suwanee and Buford, and North Fulton and Forsyth — Johns Creek, Alpharetta, Milton, Roswell and Cumming. Same rates throughout. See the service area.