Water and Electricty

I had briefly alluded to this in the previous post, but it’s really the main reason I’ve had so much attention on my irrigation system lately:  I’ve got no electricity in my water!

Well, not exactly…but electricity is not flowing which means water isn’t flowing to my very thirsty lawn.

It started earlier in the season when I was trying to start up the system and manually test zones.  The weather decided it was going to rain until about mid June.  It also seemed to rain every weekend.  This meant the rain sensor was always activated when I was home and the controller would not fire any zone, even if triggered manually.  This was frustrating.  (Looking back it may not have worked due to all of the problems I am having now. Read further to understand.)

The logical step was to bypass the sensor.  At the time it didn’t appear to do anything.  Frustration increased.  I had had it up to ~points to chest~ here.  If the bypass wasn’t going to work, I’d bypass it the old fashioned way by unplugging the rain sensor.

This turned out to be possibly a bad idea.  After unplugging the rain sensor it became apparent that the controller would no longer turn on.  Further investigation revealed that the wiring job inside the controller was a pretty terrible hack job.  At this point I assumed I fried the controller and didn’t want to bother to troubleshoot it as I wanted a different controller anyway.  (Upon further thought, I may have fried the outlet or something.  Power strips don’t seem to work in the outlet, but the refrigerator we have does.  I’m nervous that the ground isn’t working properly.  Some one please illuminate me on this one.)

I went out and purchased an EtherRain with the intention of integrating it into a home automation system.  For this to work I had to convert my current redundant router into a client bridge that would allow the Irrigation Controller to exist on the home network.  This in itself is another post; for now just know that it went smooth and you need to run the Ether Admin application on a 32 bit machine.

With the zones hooked up to the EtherRain, I decided to give it a go.  I found that 2 zones were able to be activated from the controller and 5 appeared dead.

Group 1 didn’t work, Group 2 had 2 of 3 working and Group 3 didn’t respond at all.

Elizabeth’s dad was over and showed me how to activate the zones manually.  This would prove invaluable in my troubleshooting experience.  I was able to narrow down which zones were not working due to bad solenoids/wiring and which zones likely had a bad jar valve or diaphragm.

I now believe that group 2 has a bad solenoid and group 3 has a bad common wire connection.  Group 1 for some reason started working after I fixed the sprinkler heads.  This made no sense, but I’ll take what I can get.  In addition to not responding to electricity group 3 has a zone that has ceased to respond to manual activation.  I actually shut of the water line to the entire sprinkler system and took apart the jar valve for this misbehaving zone.  I could see no issue.  I believe that there is something plugging the pipe, bad diaphragm, bad solenoid or a leak in the pipe underground some where.  I have no idea how to cheaply test these hypothesis.

Hopefully the heat abates and I can get the multimeter on the wires this weekend and try to figure out if there is indeed a break in the wire to group 3.  I don’t know how much I can figure out as the zones didn’t respond to a DIY zone activator.  (This removes the controller from the equation and gives guaranteed voltage to the circuit.)

It’s at this point that I am debating hiring a professional to finish the job.  If it turns out that there is a short or a cut in the wire somewhere, I certainly do not want to have to lay the new wire.  A number of the heads need to be readjusted (dugout and repositioned) and due to foliage growth new sprinkler heads should be added to the system and some nozzle changes are needed.  (If you read the previous post you know that most likely means changing the sprinkler head itself due to outdated parts.)  It’s starting to look like a serious task that is a bit beyond my desired involvement.

If anyone has some basic wiring skills, I could certainly use the help this weekend.  I’m going to give it one more go before I break down call a professional.  We are currently manually activating each zone to water the lawn and that needs to come to an end.

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