Waterscapes publishes irrigation troubleshooting guide as industry marks Smart Irrigation Month

Waterscapes, a UK specialist in commercial irrigation systems and water feature maintenance, has published a practical troubleshooting guide to help facilities and estates teams diagnose the irrigation faults that surface in high summer.

The guide arrives as the industry marks Smart Irrigation Month, the annual July campaign promoting water-efficient irrigation.

Written with Maintenance Contracts Manager Ed Harwood, the guide covers the faults behind most summer callouts: low pressure and weak coverage, leaks, controller and valve faults, electrical issues, and systems that coped in spring but struggle in July. For each, it sets out what site teams can safely check in-house and where specialist diagnosis becomes the cheaper option.

The guide is built around three diagnostic questions: whether a fault affects one zone or the whole system, whether it is new or recurring, and whether anything on the site has changed. According to Waterscapes, answering these before calling a specialist regularly turns a half-day investigation into an hour.

"The most useful thing a site team can do is narrow a fault down before they call," said Ed Harwood, Maintenance Contracts Manager at Waterscapes.

"If we arrive knowing it’s one zone, it’s recurring, and it started after the groundworks went in, a half-day investigation becomes an hour. The checks a team does in ten minutes are worth more than any part they might have replaced."

The guide draws a firm line on electrical faults, which Waterscapes identifies as the category where in-house troubleshooting wastes the most money. Intermittent wiring faults impersonate failed components, and sites can spend a full season replacing parts without touching the underlying fault.

Marking Smart Irrigation Month, the guide also notes that flow monitoring, remote alerts and weather-based controllers change when faults are found rather than how they are fixed, and it follows the company’s June guidance on when smart irrigation upgrades pay for themselves.

The full guide is available on the Waterscapes website at waterscapes.co.uk or by clicking here.