Reticulation Armadale

a large Armadale aged-care village

Some sites are big enough to have their own weather. This Armadale aged-care village runs four reticulation controllers across its grounds — and when we first walked in, even the site's own records couldn't tell the whole story. What followed was a partnership across three seasons that shows exactly how we handle complex grounds.

Chapter one — the mainline in the tree roots. Our first call-out found a cracked 40mm PVC mainline buried deep in the roots of a mature tree — unreachable without butchering the tree. Instead of forcing it, we scoped a re-route in writing, then came back and dug a new line around the tree and under the fence, where roots can't crush it again. While on site we tested every controller, replaced damaged pop-ups and nozzles across the grounds, and reset the schedules — including moving a 2am start time to 4am, so residents could actually see their reticulation running instead of reporting it broken. Fewer phantom faults ever since.

Chapter two — the map said three controllers. On a later visit we walked the grounds with management and staff, marking every resident complaint on their site map — a map that still showed three controllers. One system had its common wire sitting disconnected: reconnected, the whole section came back to life on the spot. Another had a valve stuck open, dragging pressure down across eight stations — one solenoid swap fixed it. The third controller ran a hybrid two-wire setup with its two-wire side completely down; we tracked the wiring, located the buried solenoids, and proved the stations still worked before any repair went ahead. And the fourth controller — on the side of the bingo hall, running six stations — we mapped in ourselves. The village got back a fully marked-up map of every controller, zone and fault, a written scope with an honest budget for the two-wire repair, and our recommendation that their own staff be trained for the small jobs.

Chapter three — delivered as scoped. Months later, a two-man crew returned and did exactly what the scope promised: decoders replaced, a station found buried under mature shrubs brought back online, excavation damage from a construction site across the road repaired, laterals fixed and sprinklers swapped — every fix walked through with the site caretaker as it happened. Scoped in writing first, delivered as scoped. No surprises on the invoice.

That's the whole method in one site: diagnose properly, document everything, price honestly, come back and deliver — and leave the client knowing their own system better than when we arrived.

a Perth commercial builder

For a commercial building group we've now worked with across multiple projects, we delivered the full reticulation and landscaping package on an Armadale site over three staged visits: wall-mounted Hunter controller, compliant master-valve manifold, waterwise-designed zones with every solenoid boxed and mapped, soil conditioning to improve the clay base, corten steel edging and Sir Walter buffalo lawn — finished with an As-Constructed reticulation plan so the client owns a complete record of what's in the ground. Repeat commercial work is earned: staged delivery that tracks the build program, revised scopes handled without drama, clean documented handover every time.

An Armadale system needed more than one visit, and the sequence matters. On arrival the hard-wired controller was not functioning correctly, which made testing the rest of the system impossible — without a working controller there is no way to energise a station and see what it does. Our technician replaced the master solenoid valve, installed an isolation ball valve and replaced a broken coil to get the system operating manually in the meantime. Once a working controller was installed we returned, programmed it and tested every station properly. That is when the real fault list appeared: all four solenoid valves in the back yard were faulty and were replaced, with the pipework reviewed and renewed where needed. Diagnosis in the right order saves money — testing valves through a controller that does not work produces results you cannot trust.

Alongside the headline jobs, PRE crews are in Armadale on cyclical maintenance rounds under commercial facilities and housing maintenance programs — 80+ service visits and counting — plus residential repairs, servicing and controller upgrades across the suburb.