What general maintenance things to you let your tenants do?

[Nik Moushon]

I'm look for answers to my question both on a specific situation (which I'll describe) and as a general overview.

This is my first rental. Tenants moved in a month ago. Summer is in full swing now and in my location it is very hot and dry. So if you want a green lawn you have to have irrigation. I went by the house yesterday to water to flower bed since its not hooked up to irrigation (yet). The tenant is moving from Alaska, so he is gone for a couple weeks and asked me to help, I dont mind doing something small like this, plus I would just rather be helpful than deal with having to replace an entire flower bed, even if they have to pay for it. Anyways, back to my problem. I noticed a couple sprinklers were not getting the pressure they needed to properly cover their required areas and thus giving me some nice big dead areas in between sprinklers. I know what the cause was - the filter needed to be cleaned out. Not a big deal, it take 5 min. But I had just cleaned it before the tenant moved in, which mean the filter needs to be cleaned at least once a month. Now I normally would not want the tenant messing with the irrigation stuff (like replacing or repairing) but since this is a SFR, not MF, and they are in charge of lawn care (per the contract), is this something that I should pass off to them? It requires shutting off the water at the street before removing the filter and rinsing it off. Not a complicated task but still multiple steps to insure its done right. So with this kind of "equipment" would you put that task on the tenant or would you do it yourself? Also, where do you draw the line for things like this that seem like easy maintenance but you just choose to do yourself for one reason or another?


TL;DR - Would you put the "burden" of making sure the irrigation system filter is cleaned out once month on the tenant or would you do it yourself?