In today’s competitive marketplace, you can set yourself apart from your competitors by specializing in a niche. If you’re a lawn care or hardscaping contractor, you already have a niche when you add irrigation system services to your business.

However, you can further specialize as an irrigation specialist when you’re an expert in one area of sprinkler systems.

If you’re a landscape contractor, and you also provide lawn and garden sprinklers for homeowners and property managers, you can specialize in one of these sprinkler specialties:

1. New installation
2. Monthly maintenance
3. System repairs
4. Maintenance plans that include opening up sprinklers in the spring and closing them for the winter.

What Does an Irrigation Specialist Do?

Overall, irrigation specialists wear many different hats. Here are those responsibilities:

• Sprinkler specialists oversee sprinkler system planning, design, installation, and maintenance.

 

• Irrigation specialists work with electrical wires and cabling. Also, sprinkler system specialists work in the dirt, mud and water.

 

• There is one goal that all sprinkler system specialists adhere to---giving the best watering results for their customers while using the least amount of water.

 

• Lawn sprinkler specialists are part mechanical engineer and part observer. They have the technical know-how to make sure that the job—whether that’s design, installation, maintenance, or repairs—gets done correctly.

Irrigation Design and Installation

If you’re lucky to have a designer or two on staff, you can focus your company’s energies on irrigation design and installation. At K-Rain, we provide you with product manuals, videos, FAQs, as well as an online tool for designing and installing our irrigation products.

We provide you with CAD Detail Drawings that include the following:

• Irrigation controllers and rain sensors
• Rotors
• Pro S Sprays
• Pro S Sprays with rotary nozzles
• Valves.

If you want to specialize in sports field sprinkler systems design and installation, you’ll find CAD Detail Drawings tailored for sports field design, including

• Baseball
• Football
• Little League 
• Soccer
• Tennis.

Monthly Maintenance for Residential and Commercial Sprinkler Systems

If you provide lawn care or landscaping services, you know that your customers benefit from a WaterSense sprinkler design installed on their property.

You may know of a contractor who supplies irrigation system designs and installation, but who won’t perform regular monthly check-ups. Depending on where you live, sprinkler systems may be used year-round. So, monthly maintenance contracts can be lucrative.

Yet, all lawn sprinklers need regular maintenance because kids step on spray heads or mowers run over them. If you want, you can specialize in both regular maintenance service as well as repairing sprinkler systems.

Monthly maintenance contracts are prevention plans in progress. When you visit a property to work on a customer’s sprinklers, you’ll examine the system by turning on the controller to test each zone.

Each zone will run water for one to two minutes. During each zone test, you, as the irrigation specialist, will check for

• Adequate water coverage
• To make sure there are no leaks
• Broken spray heads
• Clogged nozzles.

As part of the job, you’ll need to adjust sprinkler heads, check water pressure, and inspect the system for any leaks.

You can also provide sprinkler system audits as part of your maintenance contract.

An irrigation auditor provides testing to verify that all systems are watering evenly as well as make any needed adjustments. Typically, customers’ sprinklers need an audit every few years.

Lawn and Garden Sprinkler Repair Services

If you have maintenance contracts, your next step would include irrigation repair services, or you could specialize in repairs only.

If there is a lot of competition with other contracting companies providing sprinkler services, such as design, installation, and maintenance, you could partner with them when you focus solely on repair services.

Here are some common repairs that irrigation specialists perform:

1. Repair broken pipes
2. Troubleshoot electrical shorts
3. Locate wires underground
4. Repair damaged spray heads
5. Fix dripline systems.

When you pick sprinkler repair services, you’ll be working in the dirt, mud, and water. You also need to understand electrical wiring when there are electrical short circuits in a system.

Unfortunately, phone and TV cables, as well as underground electrical wiring, make fixing a short a complex job. You might not be able to find the true source of the short circuit. So, you may need to rewire the entire sprinkler system to get it working again.

The homeowner or property manager may not notice if one of the spray heads isn’t working anymore.

When a broken spray head goes undetected, it wastes a lot of water. Your customer will only suspect something is wrong when they get the monthly water bill.

Yet, you can fix a sprinkler system spray head quickly by switching heads, cleaning the inside of a spray head, or replacing a nozzle.

You’ll know when a dripline isn’t working because there is a wet spot in the lawn or on the sports field. Again, your customer may not notice. Depending on the wet spot’s location, your customer may not see the wasted water.

Finally, as a lawn and garden sprinkler specialist, you’ll be working with retrofitted irrigation systems that could be up to 30 years old. Some of these repairs are easy to fix, or you may need to use your selling skills to encourage the customer to invest in a new system.

How K-Rain Helps You No Matter which Niche You Specialize In

K-Rain’s Premier Contractor Program (PCP) is designed to help you to save money as well as improve your niche irrigation specialty growth. When you enroll as a PCP, you earn store credit or a rebate with your very first purchase from an authorized dealer.

You can learn more about our PCP and sign up to become a member on our website. You can find your local K-Rain authorized dealer on our site, as well.

If you have any questions regarding K-Rain parts, call our customer service at 800-735-7246.