How much should I allow for irrigation maintenance? If you plan on paying an irrigation or landscape company to maintain the system, You should spend 2-5 % of the per capita irrigation installation cost for irrigation maintenance.
Irrigation System Maintenance Cost
Irrigation system maintenance needs to be budgeted for. Unfortunately, many sound irrigation systems are disasters due to insufficient irrigation maintenance.
Remember that when you choose an irrigation system to be installed, you select a lot of infrastructure to add to your home. An irrigation system on an average home in Melbourne could have as much as 1 km of pipework installed, 100 sprinkler heads, and kilometers of dripline. That is a lot of infrastructure to manage.
Irrigation systems can be damaged by pedestrian traffic, pets, wildlife, tradesmen, gardening, vehicular traffic, and sometimes just by blatant vandalism.
We recently attended a big commercial site with an extensive irrigation system installed about five years ago. They had not budgeted enough money for irrigation maintenance and only engaged an irrigation company for a couple of hours for reactive repairs. No one was looking after this vast irrigation system. The landscape (worth millions of dollars) was suffering due to the lack of care for the irrigation system.
We were called in to get the system operational. We did over 1000 repairs to the design, and the repair bill hit over $20,000.00. But that was only the irrigation repair bill. The landscape repair bill ran into the hundreds of thousands, and the water bill was three times what it should have been due to poor irrigation scheduling. So, based on those figures, the cost of not maintaining the irrigation system is far more expensive than properly maintaining it.
It makes financial sense to maintain your irrigation system.
So, how much does PROACTIVE irrigation maintenance cost?
As a ballpark. For a site that has
< 500m2 of irrigated area allows $250 – $450 per year
501m2 to 1000m2 of irrigated area allow $350 – $750 per year
1001m2 to 2500m2 of irrigated area allow $450 to $850 per year
2501m2 to 4000m2 of irrigated area allow $750 to $1500 per year.
These figures don’t allow for systems prone to damage. If you have sprinklers installed on a road edge that cars constantly drive over or if you have a commercial site that is regularly vandalised – then maintenance costs can skyrocket.
At Ecostream, we are trying to change how people approach irrigation maintenance.
Most people are reactive when it comes to irrigation maintenance. We will discuss proactive maintenance options if you call us to do your irrigation maintenance.
