Hanging Christmas Lights in Colorado Without Wrecking Your Sprinklers

Short version

Keep stakes and ladder feet off your sprinkler heads, and off the straight runs between them. That line between two heads is where the pipe is.

Here's why nobody worries about it. Lights go up in late November and come down in January, and the whole time the system is dry and depressurized because it was blown out in October. Push a stake through a lateral line and nothing happens. No leak, no spray, no hiss. Nothing tells you anything at all.

Then in late April we turn the system on, the lines fill under pressure, and a patch of lawn turns into a puddle. By then the lights have been down for three months and nobody connects the two.

What gets hit

Lateral lines. The pipes feeding each head run in fairly direct lines from one to the next, close enough to the surface that an ordinary garden stake reaches them. Driving a stake straight down between two heads is the most common way a homeowner puts a hole in their own system.

The heads. A pop-up sits flush with the grass, which makes it a flat, firm, invisible place to stand a ladder foot. Put a person on that ladder and it's a lot of weight on one small point. You can crack the body, push the head out of level, or snap it off the riser.

Drip in the beds. Often not buried at all, just run under the mulch. Beds are also where people like to put pathway lights. Drip tubing punctures if you look at it wrong.

Valve boxes. Those green lids take weight badly. A cracked lid fills with soil over the winter and you find that in spring too.

Before you start

Walk the lawn in daylight. Heads are easier to spot in late fall than people expect, because the grass has stopped growing over them. Mark them with a golf tee if you'll be working after dark, which in December you will be, because it's dark here by about half four.

Then picture a line from each head to the next and keep your stakes well off it.

Push stakes in, don't hammer them. If a stake stops dead against something a few inches down, that's information. Move it. Hammering through resistance is exactly how a stake goes through a pipe.

For ladders, use the driveway or the path where you can. Where you can't, put a board under the feet to spread the load, and look down before you set it.

The best thing you can do takes thirty seconds and costs nothing: during your blowout, when every head is being worked on and all of them are easy to see, take a couple of photos on your phone. That's the best zone map you'll ever have.

The other Colorado problem: December wind

This one catches people out who've moved here from somewhere flatter.

The National Weather Service office in Boulder has put it plainly: December and January are the two peak months for the strongest downslope winds in Colorado. Not an occasional thing. The peak. Boulder County has recorded gusts over 100 mph in December windstorms, with tens of thousands of customers losing power.

So a roofline covered in fixed-length retail string lights, held on with whatever was in the drawer, is being asked to survive something most of the country never deals with. When those runs let go they take gutter clips, sometimes gutter, and they end up in the lawn, where you then walk around on frozen grass pulling at them. That's a second way to find your sprinkler heads.

If you're doing it yourself, over-clip rather than under-clip, and give the runs no slack to flap. Slack is what turns a gust into leverage.

If you think you hit something

You probably won't know at the time, which is the awkward part. Note where it was and tell us at spring turn-on. Knowing roughly where to look turns a long diagnostic into a short one, and a known lateral repair is a much smaller job than chasing a mystery wet spot across a lawn.

A head is easier. That's a straightforward swap and it can wait until spring.

Order of operations

Winterization first, lights second. The system has to be cleared before the first hard freeze anyway, and once it's done you're at least working on a dry system, so a stake through a lateral is a repair rather than a repair plus a flooded lawn.

If your sprinklers haven't been blown out yet this season, that's the more urgent of the two. See sprinkler blowouts.

Or let us do it

We hang Christmas lights now, mostly because we're already on these properties and already know what's buried where. We supply the lights, put them up, and come back in January to take them down. C9 bulbs on socket wire, cut to length for each run, so it follows the roof instead of falling short or doubling back.

Rooflines, trees and bushes, walkways and railings, wreaths and garland. See Christmas light installation, or call (970) 692-7270 and we'll come look at the house.