On the isles and along the waterfront, irrigation fights salt, a high water table and very little room to dig. Fort Lauderdale jobs usually start with mapping rather than repair.
Older Fort Lauderdale properties have typically been added to three or four times across the decades, by different contractors, with no two zones on the same kind of pipe. Valve boxes get paved over, buried under mulch, or swallowed by a hedge. Half the heads belong to a zone that no longer has a working valve.
So the first visit on these properties is usually locating valve boxes and working out which head belongs to which zone. You get a written map out of it whether or not you go ahead with repairs, and that map is worth having the next time anybody digs in that yard.
Seawalls, mature ficus roots and a water table shallow enough that a two-foot trench finds it — a trencher is often simply the wrong tool here. Hand digging is slower and we price it that way up front rather than discovering it on site and revising the number. If a job genuinely needs hand work, you will know before we start.
Root damage is the other waterfront constant. Ficus and banyan roots crush lateral lines slowly, which shows as a zone that gradually weakened over years rather than failing one day.
Waterfront hardware corrodes on the same clock as Hollywood's beachside lots. Expect us to specify brass or stainless on anything exposed, and expect overspray onto a seawall or a dock to be something we actively adjust out rather than ignore — salt spray back onto the planting is its own problem.
Finding buried valve boxes and documenting which head belongs to which zone. A normal first visit on an older Fort Lauderdale property.
Isolated by zone and pressure, which matters doubly where the water table is close and nothing surfaces.
Lateral lines crushed by ficus and banyan roots, re-routed rather than just patched where the roots will take them again.
Brass and stainless on exposed waterfront hardware, because plated parts will not last the year out here.
Yes, and that is a normal starting point here. Locating buried valve boxes and mapping head-to-zone is a standard first visit on older Fort Lauderdale properties, and you keep the written map either way.
On the isles, often the opposite — seawalls, roots and a shallow water table mean hand digging rather than a trencher. It is slower, and we price it that way before we start rather than revising the number on site.
Usually root damage. Ficus and banyan roots crush a lateral line gradually, so the zone fades rather than fails. Patching the crush point without re-routing just moves the problem a few feet.
Yes. Expect more hand work and more care around mature plantings, and expect us to say so in the quote rather than afterwards.
Tell us what it is doing and we will tell you what it is likely to be before we come out.