Explainer · the valve · free to read
One valve that
never quite closes.
Inside every zone valve is a rubber diaphragm that has to seat perfectly against a ring to stop the water. A grain of sand, a worn edge, or a solenoid that does not fully drop, and it seats almost. Almost is the expensive word. The zone is never really off — it weeps, all night, all season, at a rate too small to hear.
How to tell
The lowest head on the zone gives it away.
Water in a pipe under pressure looks for the lowest exit. On a weeping zone that is the lowest head, and it will be wet at seven in the morning when nothing has run since midnight. The ground around it stays soft. Mushrooms turn up. The lawn there is a darker green than the rest, right up until it is brown, because roots that never dry out rot.
Lift the lid on the valve box and it is often standing in water. That is not always the valve — the box is the low point too — but it is where we start.
A weep is small every minute and enormous over a summer, and a bill that goes up a few dollars a month looks like the weather. On a flat-rate account it does not go up at all. That is why these run for years.
The arithmetic
What a weep costs over a Sacramento season.
Three sizes of weep, run for the 210 days a system is on here. The gallons are arithmetic. The dollars are those gallons at the one rate we could verify, and at the top tier of two districts on our map where a leak is billed at the highest price on the schedule.
| How much it weeps | Gallons a day | Gallons a season | At $1.22 | PCWA top tier $2.97 | Golden State top tier $3.14 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A trickle 0.25 gallons a minute | 360 | 75,600 | $123 | $300 | $317 |
| A pencil-thick stream 0.5 gallons a minute | 720 | 151,200 | $247 | $600 | $635 |
| A steady run 1 gallons a minute | 1,440 | 302,400 | $493 | $1,201 | $1,269 |
A pencil-thick stream is the one we see most. It is also the one that costs more over a season than any repair that fixes it.
The fix
A twenty-dollar part, once you know which valve.
Debris on the seat
Sand or a scrap of pipe shaving under the diaphragm. The valve comes apart, gets flushed, goes back together, and seats.
A tired diaphragm
Rubber that has gone hard or torn at the edge. A new diaphragm is a small part; a new valve is not much more.
The solenoid
The plunger sticks and never fully drops. Swapped in minutes once it is identified — and identifying it is the job.
You can try this one yourself · the price of an afternoon
Shut the water off at the irrigation shut-off, open the suspect valve’s bleed screw or lid, and flush it. Half the time that is the whole repair. The hard part is knowing which valve; on a system with six zones and one wet head, it is the valve feeding the zone the wet head is on.
We will still do it if you would rather not — we would just rather you knew.
Usually Option 01 · Fix It — the reported fault found, fixed, and that zone tested before we go, at one price given in writing before we start. If we find a second one while we are in the box, we say so and quote it — we do not fold it in.
Your district has a clock on this
Once you know, you are on the clock.
Most districts on our map require a leak to be repaired within a set time of notice — 48 hours for Golden State Water in Rancho Cordova, 72 hours for PCWA in Rocklin and Loomis, three to five days elsewhere. Your area page has yours.
The weep sizes are illustrations — a quarter, a half and one gallon a minute — and the gallons are those rates run for 210 days. The first dollar column prices them at $1.22 per CCF, from Sacramento Suburban Water District tier 1 (0–15 CCF), rates effective 1 January 2026; the other two use the top residential tier published by PCWA and Golden State Water for 2026, verified September 2026.
Every provider on our map prices water differently, and four of them we have not verified. Treat the dollars as an order of magnitude and the gallons as the real number — the gallons do not change with your provider. If you are on an unmetered flat rate, a leak costs you nothing on the bill at all, which is exactly why it is allowed to run for years.