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Forget what I have...maybe Rainbird....anyway, the display and board are powered by AA batteries, the zone valves are powered by a plug in transformer. Do you have voltage where the transformer ties to the board?
Al
I don't have a rain sensor, so when I want to do it manually and winterize, I flip off the switch that controls the outlet the transformer is plugged into. Maybe you have a circuit still off in the electric panel???
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I also have a Rainbird. I can't see where to put in any batteries though. Beyond removing some actual screws I'm not sure if it has a battery backup. I went ahead and plugged the wall unit into an outlet that I know for sure works and still nothing. But are you saying my irrigation system gets power from another source? Not trying to sound dumb.. but I though the entire system was powered from the wall device. If that isn't the case, maybe that is part of the problem.. a breaker is flipped for the irrigation system. I don't see any that are labeled for the irrigation system but I'll start flipping them on and off and hope that might fix it...
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The water hasn't been turned off to the sprinkler, has it?
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Do all of the solenoid leads terminate on the control board? Or are the commons bonded together remotely, with one wire to the control board? All of the non-common (hot?) leads, of course, would have to terminate individually on the board.
It's just that if none of them work, then something common to all of them is bad, including a single connection (hence the question about a common lead), or the power transformer that actually supplies the solenoids (as opposed to the logic board), or a fuse to/from the power transformer, or something like that.
Could also be a dead short somewhere, drowning the transformer so it's got nothing left.
Tom
“This place smells like that odd combination of flop sweat, hopelessness, aaaand feet"
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(04-03-2017, 10:32 PM)themoon Wrote: I also have a Rainbird. I can't see where to put in any batteries though. Beyond removing some actual screws I'm not sure if it has a battery backup. I went ahead and plugged the wall unit into an outlet that I know for sure works and still nothing. But are you saying my irrigation system gets power from another source? Not trying to sound dumb.. but I though the entire system was powered from the wall device. If that isn't the case, maybe that is part of the problem.. a breaker is flipped for the irrigation system. I don't see any that are labeled for the irrigation system but I'll start flipping them on and off and hope that might fix it...
How about a pic of your device or a model number??? Can you find the terminal board where the wires tie into the valves?
Transformer is power for the valves and ties into the terminal board. You should have battery backup for the display/clock.
timer
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I lost a couple zones (out of 10) one time and unplugging/replugging the control box fixed it. Dunno what happened.
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this is one of the few problems I never had when I was burdened with trying to keep a yard alive in the desert of northern Utah. What a silly idea. Now I look at the place on google's satellite view, and the current owners have killed just about all the grass.
I think you should be able to test by direct connecting a voltage across the solenoid. Would a 9v battery work? My guess is that it would. Solenoids usually aren't set up to care about the polarity of the voltage.
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Most of the sprinkler valves are 24v AC, so I don't think a 9v DC battery is going to work.
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probably not. I was thinking they were 12vdc. Should be able to go direct to the transformer though
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Odd question...but does your control unit have a 9V battery backup? If it does...try replacing it. I had a problem with my unit last year where even when plugged in, the system would not activate the zones. Pull the power plug, and the control stayed on...which made me think the battery was fine. For the heck of it I swapped the battery and everything went back to working fine. Two days later...problem came back. I ended up just replacing the control...but it still was demonstrable that a weak 9V battery was able to make the unit act funky.
