Guide
Redmond’s Watering Schedule, and Why It Shows Up on Your Glass
If you live in Redmond and the bottom third of your south-facing windows goes chalky white every summer, the cause is usually not your tap water. It is your sprinklers, running on a schedule the city sets, hitting the glass and drying in the high desert sun before it can run off.
Understanding the watering rules explains the spotting, and it tells you when cleaning your windows is actually worth it.
The Rules, as They Stand Now
Redmond runs a mandatory outdoor watering schedule during irrigation season. The city updated it under Ordinance 2026-01, so if you are going off a rule you remember from a few years ago, check the current version, because the hours in particular have changed.
As the city currently publishes it:
- Season: April 1 through October 31.
- Days: Even-numbered addresses water on even-numbered days. Odd-numbered addresses water on odd-numbered days.
- No watering on the 31st of any month.
- Hours: Watering is only allowed between 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m. In other words, no sprinklers during the day, from 9 in the morning to 7 in the evening.
That daytime ban is the part that changed. The older rule only blocked watering from late morning to late afternoon. The current window is much wider, which means most legal watering now happens in the evening and overnight.
Always treat the City of Redmond’s Water Conservation page as the authority here. Ordinances change, and the city is the only source that is always current. We are a window cleaning company, not the water department.
Why the Schedule Creates Spotting
Here is the chain of events that ends up on your glass.
Redmond’s water is groundwater, drawn from the Deschutes Formation. Whether it leaves mineral behind depends on your specific situation, but a great deal of Redmond irrigation runs on private wells outside city limits, and well mineral content varies from one property to the next. When mineral-bearing water lands on a window and dries, it leaves the mineral behind.
The schedule concentrates when that happens. Because daytime watering is banned, sprinklers run in the evening and overnight. A sprinkler head that is even slightly out of alignment throws water onto the lower part of a window. Overnight, that water sits. Then the morning sun hits it, and in Redmond’s dry air it evaporates fast, leaving a mineral film exactly where the spray landed. Repeat that every other day for seven months and you get a hard, banded deposit across the bottom of the glass.
That is why the spotting is almost always on the lower third, and almost always on the sides of the house a sprinkler can reach.
Open Ground Makes It Worse
Redmond sits lower and more exposed than Bend, with less tree cover and more open, dusty ground. Wind lifts fine grit off gravel drives, unpaved county roads, and open lots, and drops it on the nearest vertical surface. That grit settles into window screens and onto glass year round.
When you combine airborne dust with evening irrigation, you get a particularly stubborn result: dust settles on damp, mineral-laden glass and effectively cements itself in place as it dries. A quick wipe does not touch it.
What This Means for When You Should Clean
The watering schedule is the single best guide to timing your window cleaning in Redmond.
Do not book your main clean in the middle of irrigation season if you can help it. If your sprinklers are running every other night from April through October, glass cleaned in June is spotted again by August. You would be paying for a result that does not last.
The most valuable clean is in early fall, after October 31, once the season closes. At that point the spotting has stopped being replenished, and clean glass stays clean through winter. That timing also lines up with clearing gutters before the first hard freeze, so most Redmond homeowners do both in one visit.
If you want a second clean, late spring, once pollen has finished but before irrigation has built up much deposit, is the other sensible window.
If you only clean once a year in Redmond, make it October.
The Fix That Costs Nothing
Before you pay anyone, including us, to remove hard water spotting, it is worth dealing with the source.
Most Redmond sprinkler spotting comes from a head that is aimed wrong or set to the wrong pattern. Two adjustments solve most of it:
- Switch spray heads to stream or rotor heads where they are hitting the house. Streams are far less likely to drift onto glass than a fine spray.
- Angle heads away from the building. A head does not need to water the wall to water the lawn beside it.
Do that, and you stop the problem at the source instead of treating the symptom on the glass every year. It also happens to use water more efficiently, which is the whole point of the city’s schedule in the first place.
Note that drip irrigation and hand-watering with a shut-off nozzle are exempt from the day-of-week schedule entirely, and neither one throws water onto your windows. If you are converting beds near the house away from spray heads, that is a double win.
When the Spot Will Not Come Off
Some deposits have moved past the point where cleaning helps.
Here is the test: wet the cloudy area with plain water and look at it while it is still wet. If the haze softens or partly disappears, the mineral is sitting on the surface and it can be removed. If it looks exactly the same wet as dry, the mineral has etched into the glass itself, and no cleaning product reverses that.
Time is the variable. A deposit that wipes off after a month of exposure can be permanent by month six. That is another argument for cleaning at the end of the season rather than letting a full winter and the next spring pass before dealing with it.
When we quote hard water restoration in Redmond, we patch test a small area first, so you find out whether the deposit lifts before you pay for the work, not after.
How We Work Around the Schedule
For a full window clean in Redmond, the watering schedule mostly affects timing, not the work itself. We use purified water through water-fed poles, so our own cleaning does not leave spots the way sprinkler water does, and we work from the ground, never on your roof.
If you are on a Redmond property with well water and heavy spotting, tell us when you get a quote. It changes what we recommend, and it is the difference between a wash that lasts and one that is spotted again by the next watering cycle. The spotting itself, and why Bend-area tap water is not usually the culprit, is covered in more depth in our Bend water guide.
Redmond Windows Spotted From Sprinklers?
Send us a photo and we will tell you whether the deposit lifts or the glass has etched, before you pay for anything.
Sources
- City of Redmond, Water Conservation page (Ordinance 2026-01, current watering window 7 p.m. to 9 a.m.)
- City of Redmond, Frequently Asked Questions (season April 1 to October 31, odd/even by address, no watering on the 31st, exemptions for drip and hand-watering)
- Redmond Spokesman, on the city irrigation season and water use
Watering rules change. The City of Redmond’s own Water Conservation page is the current authority for your address.
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