San Diego, CA
IRRIGATION / SPRINKLER ESTIMATING.

## Bidding irrigation work in San Diego is not the same as bidding it anywhere else San Diego's tiered water pricing structure, mandatory water-efficient landscape ordinances, and the San Diego County Water Authority's water-use restrictions shape every residential and commercial irrigation job you quote. A flat-rate estimating template built for, say, a contractor in the Midwest will lose you money here. You need numbers grounded in local reality. Estimate.Pro is built for irrigation contractors who work under these conditions every day. --- ### What makes San Diego irrigation estimates hard to get right **MAWA and ETWU calculations.** California's Model Water Efficient Landscape Ordinance (MWELO) requires a Maximum Applied Water Allowance (MAWA) and an Estimated Total Water Use (ETWU) calculation on any landscape project over 500 square feet. Commercial jobs trigger this automatically. Residential additions frequently do too. Your estimate has to reflect system design that meets those thresholds — drip zones, pressure-compensating emitters, smart controllers — or you'll be repricing after plan check. **Tiered water rates.** San Diego County Water Authority passes tiered commodity rates to retail agencies. Those rates affect what your customers pay to run the system you install. A client who gets sticker shock at their first water bill will call you, not the water district. Quoting a system that pencils out on total cost of ownership — hardware plus operating cost — builds trust and referrals. **Material lead times from local suppliers.** Hunter, Rain Bird, and Toro distribution runs through a handful of San Diego-area supply houses. Pricing on poly pipe, PVC, and smart controllers shifts with Southern California freight costs. Your saved material cost workspace in Estimate.Pro lets you lock in current prices from your preferred supplier and apply them across every bid — no manual re-entry job to job. **Permit requirements vary by jurisdiction.** The City of San Diego, Chula Vista, Escondido, and unincorporated county parcels each have slightly different permit triggers and backflow preventer inspection requirements. A commercial job in the City of San Diego requires a permit for new irrigation systems; residential replacements under a certain scope sometimes do not. Know the line before you write the scope. --- ### How Estimate.Pro works for irrigation contractors **Walkthrough to bid in 8 minutes.** Walk the property, open the app, and use AR measurement on supported devices to capture zone dimensions. The AI scope-of-work engine reads your inputs — zone count, head type, controller model, backflow assembly, valve manifold count — and builds a line-item estimate. Median time from first measurement to a sendable bid is 8 minutes. **Camera and photo measurement.** On jobs where AR isn't practical — a rooftop mechanical well or a plan set you're working from at the office — photo measurements are supported and clearly marked as estimates in the output. Clients see the transparency; you control the conversation. **Trade-specific line items.** Irrigation is one of 25 supported trades. The item library covers poly mainline, lateral pipe, swing joints, pop-up rotors, drip emitters, pressure regulators, master valves, flow sensors, and smart controllers. You're not adapting a generic construction template. **Payments on Pro+ tiers.** If you run Stripe Connect through Estimate.Pro, the platform fee is 0% on Pro and Elite plans. The Free tier carries a 3% platform fee. Elite plans add invoice exports for jobs that require formal billing documentation. --- ### Pricing that fits a small crew or a growing company - **Free** — no credit card, no expiration. Good for getting started. - **Pro** — $39/seat/month. Removes platform fees on Stripe Connect. - **Elite** — $79/seat/month. Adds Stripe Connect, invoice exports, and advanced workflows. - **Crew** — $399/month flat. Covers the whole company regardless of seat count. A two-person operation doing residential system installs and commercial retrofits across San Diego and Chula Vista can run on a single Pro seat and cover their subscription in the margin recovered from one more accurate bid per month. --- ### Built for the conditions you actually work in San Diego irrigation contractors deal with decomposed granite soils in inland valleys, clay in coastal flatlands, and slope erosion risk on hillside lots — each requiring different head spacing, operating pressure, and sometimes hydroseeding coordination. The scope-of-work AI prompts you for site conditions so they show up in the bid, not as a surprise change order. Start free. No credit card required. Your first complete irrigation bid takes less time than a drive to the supply house.