All zones water just 1 zone
Hello, when we try to water any of our 4 zones, it always waters just 1 zone, always the same one. It was working fine before and I believe it started when some construction was done in the backyard and those guys accidentally cut a wire(s) but then connected them back together the same way- thats what they at least said and then covered it that now it would be not easy to get back to it. Do you know what is probably the issue and best steps to fix it or identify please? Thanks!
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Hi,
If the problems came at a time with the digging I suspect they mixed up some wires. You having four zones makes me think that there are 5 wires going to your valve box, one common and four zones. The common should have one wire of each of your valves connected.
The easiest way to identify wrong connections is this:
1. remove the wires from your RainMachine (including the 24VAC)
2. grab a multimeter and set it to measure ohms
3. go to your valve box and disconnect one valve
4. measure resistance between the two leads, it should be a couple tens of ohms (for example rainbird valves are~42 ohms)
5. reconnect the valve as it was before
6. go back to your RainMachine and connect one probe of the multimeter to the common wire, then scan through the rest with the second probe
7. If they connected everything back correctly, you should see similar values to what you have seen between the common and any of the zone wires. For example, If you had the exact rainbird valve I used to test, you should see ~42 ohms between any of the zone wires and the common - of course if the boys reconnected everything the way they say they did.My first hunch is that they somehow managed to swap the common wire with one of the zone wire, probably of the one you see running regardless of the zone you start.
Do you have master valve enabled?
Istvan
RainMachine Support -
I have the same issue. It started in summer by skipping one zone out of seven, then several and now only one is watered during the automated program run. When I use the program in manual mode everything seems to be fine. That tells me it's not a hardware or wiring issue. I am wondering it this is connected with some firmware update in the past.
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