Do Herriman homes have secondary water?

Some Herriman homes have secondary water and some do not, which is why this question comes up in almost every showing I do on the west side.

Herriman City describes its water department as providing both “clean, safe drinking water and secondary irrigation water,” and the city’s own FAQ page is blunt that secondary water “is only available to some areas” of Herriman (Herriman City, Water FAQs). The system dates to 2010. That is the whole answer, and the useful work is in checking your specific address. On acreage the question goes further, because water shares work differently from city secondary water and they generally do not transfer by deed.

What secondary water actually is

Secondary water is untreated, non-drinkable water delivered through a separate pipe and a separate meter, used for lawns, gardens and landscaped areas. It is not filtered to drinking standards because it does not need to be — it is going on grass.

Just over the line, Western Springs sits in Riverton, which runs its own secondary system — so whether a specific property is connected is a separate question there. Monarch Meadows is the other Riverton page where this comes up.

The reason anyone cares is cost. Culinary water is treated, and treatment is expensive. In a climate where outdoor irrigation is the single largest household water use, running your sprinklers on untreated water instead of drinking water is the difference between a tolerable summer bill and one that makes people call me in July asking whether something is broken.

Herriman’s season runs from May 1 to mid-October (Herriman City, Secondary Water). Outside those months the system is down, which matters if you are the sort of person who waters a new lawn in April.

The part that trips buyers up

The mistake I see most often is treating secondary water as a Herriman feature rather than a property feature.

It is not city-wide. Herriman grew outward in waves, and the irrigation infrastructure went in with some of those waves and not others. Two houses a few streets apart, both legitimately in Herriman, can sit on different sides of that line. The city maintains an availability map precisely because the answer varies by location. Riverton, next door, is the opposite case: Riverton’s secondary water is a citywide system billed by lot size rather than by meter.

So when a listing says “secondary water,” that is a claim about a specific parcel, and it is worth verifying rather than assuming. I have had buyers tell me a neighborhood “has secondary water” because a friend two subdivisions over does.

How to check it properly before you write an offer

This is a short, free piece of homework and it is worth doing before you are emotionally committed to a house.

What to check	How
Whether the address is in the service area	Herriman City’s secondary availability map
Whether this house is actually connected	Ask the seller; a connected home has a second meter
What the rate is	The city’s master fee schedule, which is tiered
Whether the connection passed inspection	The city requires a sprinkler connection inspection
Backflow testing	Required if culinary and secondary lines are both connected

That last pair is not a formality. Herriman’s connection requirements call for an inspection of the sprinkler connection, and current backflow testing where both lines are present, before a meter goes in. If you are buying a home where someone did their own irrigation work, this is the kind of thing that surfaces later as a cost.

The direct answer, if you want it in one call, comes from the city water department at 801-446-5323. I would rather a client spend a phone call on this than find out in June.

What it does to the bill

Herriman charges on a tiered structure, and the tiers depend on more than volume — the city’s rate schedule varies by customer type, pressure zone, meter size, whether the property has access to secondary water, and indoor versus outdoor use. Rates begin partway into the city’s master fee schedule rather than on the water page itself.

I am not going to print a dollar figure here, and I want to be straight about why. Municipal water rates change by ordinance, they are tiered in a way that makes a single number misleading, and a stale figure in a blog post is worse than no figure. Pull the current schedule, or ask the city, and you will have the real number for your meter size and your zone.

What I can tell you from watching bills is the shape of the thing. Households on secondary water see a summer bill that rises in a way they expect. Households on culinary-only irrigation in the same climate sometimes see a summer bill that genuinely surprises them, and the surprise is almost always about lawn size rather than household habits.

The honest trade-off

Secondary water is a real advantage and it is not free of complication.

The advantages: materially cheaper outdoor water, and a separate system that is not drawing down treated supply. In a county where this question is getting more pointed every year, that is not nothing.

The complications I would want a buyer to know:

• It is seasonal. The system is off from mid-October to the start of May.
• It is untreated. It is for landscape, not for filling a pool you intend to swim in without thinking about it, and not for pets to drink from a hose.
• Pressure is not guaranteed to be uniform across the system or across the day.
• It adds a connection, a meter and a backflow requirement to maintain.

None of those are reasons to avoid a home with secondary water. They are reasons to know what you are inheriting.

How I would weight it against other things

Here is where I will give you my actual opinion rather than a summary.

Secondary water should not be the reason you choose a house. It is a running-cost advantage on a purchase where the running costs are dominated by the mortgage, the taxes and the insurance. I have never seen a buyer regret a house because of its irrigation water, and I have seen buyers talk themselves into the wrong floor plan over a feature that saves them money in four months of the year.

Where it genuinely matters is at the margin, and in two specific situations. The first is a large lot with established landscaping — the bigger the irrigated area, the more the difference compounds. The second is a buyer who is already stretched, where a predictable summer utility is worth real money in the first year.

And it matters for resale. Herriman buyers ask about this now in a way they did not five years ago. If you are choosing between two comparable homes and one has it, that is a tiebreaker you will get back later.

If you are weighing yard costs more broadly, how much it costs to water a yard in Herriman goes further into the full picture, and is Herriman windy covers the other half of why landscaping here behaves differently than people expect. For a specific address, how to find out what will be built next to a house in Herriman is the same kind of city-records homework applied to a different question.

The short version

Ask the question about the parcel, not the city. Check the availability map, confirm the second meter exists, pull the current rate from the fee schedule, and make sure the connection and any backflow testing are in order. That is a free afternoon that answers the question properly.

I am Kelsey Earl, a Realtor with Keller Williams South Valley, and this is one of the handful of Herriman-specific items I check on every property before a client writes an offer, because it is cheap to verify and annoying to discover afterward. If you want me to check it on a particular address, send me the address and I will tell you what the city shows.