Jesse finished up our current list in the 83702 and 83706 yesterday except for one he couldn’t get to because of a dog, and one with a locked gate. This is twice we have run into a locked gate on Spinnaker. One more time and they get a trip charge and we are done with that property. Same goes if they cancel after we have made two attempts to blow out the sprinklers. I do have to pay for fuel, time, and labor for these trips whether we can get in or not.
I finished up Eagle yesterday. Today I will be working in Star and Middleton while Jesse works in Garden City. There are currently only 13 remaining in the 83714, so for as quick as he is, I will probably put him on a few in Meridian close to our office to finish out the day unless I run into problems and will have him get on the bottom of my route.
Saturday I make a trip to Marsing, and then Caldwell and the Nampa 83651. This will be a first for us in Marsing, so it isn’t even added on our city list on our form. Because of the location we will be charging an additional $30 as we do for other areas outside of our normal working area like Parma, Melba, Horseshoe Bend, Emmett, etc., We have actually had requests this year in Jerome, Twin Falls, and even one up near the state of Washington. With Google we have a long reach, but at this point until we can get more machines and employees located in those areas they will be off limits.
We hope to finish Nampa by Monday and head to Kuna and then Meridian again before we make our final sweep across the entire valley picking up any new ones that signed up when we left the area recently. Unless we run into a lot of problems, we should be able to finish Kuna in one day. It will take 2 rigs approximately two days to finish up the ones we have in all of Meridian. We should be finished for the season in about 7 days unless we run into problems between now and then.
I heard we might get a little snow before we are totally finished, but except for slick roads and possibly adding more time on our route it won’t do much to affect sprinkler blowouts. As I always say, snow is a good insulator; ask an Eskimo. The worst part about snow is what we run into in the fall anyway. People who don’t brush off their valve boxes so we can find them. They are hard to find under bark, rock, leaves, etc., so you know snow won’t help either. As a reminder, it does say in the terms of service that customers will make sure valve boxes are visible so we can find them. We lose a LOT of time searching for what should be easily spotted. I might start charging extra next year if we have to waste a lot of time looking for them. I do have to pay wages to techs that are working, and it also causes us to lose time that we could be doing someone else’s sprinkler blowout.
