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I’ve been using OS with an expansion board now for nearly 5 years with little to no problems. Rare when you can say that nowadays. I recently brought my sprinkler system online for spring. I have 11 valves connected to 10 zones. All the zones except 1 seem to be working fine. I had 2 zones acting up but fixed 1 by moving to a different zone.
The zone that’s fighting me is the one that has 2 valves on it. (Never gave me problems before.) I changed the zone and it worked for 2 days or so. Now I can’t get it to do anything. When I connect the valves directly to the power supply and bypass the OS, it opens just fine. I measure 28VAC from the power supply about 23VAC to the zone(s) in question and when I connect the valves, it drops to anywhere between 0VAC and 12VAC. I tried to measure current with my old untrustworthy radio shack meter and get nothing. About 30ohms across the common and the valves in question. I get similar behavior using the same valves on different zones. I tried to use a zone I know to be good but had the same results.
The valves are connected to the same wire. I repurposed one valve in a box and added one next to it for my drip irrigation for the veggie garden both are connected electrically in the box.
The previous owner did all his owner sprinkler work. I had 3 controllers in 2 building running a total of 12 zones between 2 properties. I ran an extra wire from the 2 controllers in 1 building up to the house so I could centralize the system. Needless to say, trying to backtrace the wiring is gonna be tough if that’s what I need to do.
OS hardware 2.1-ac
OS firmware – 2.1.5 (1)
App Version – 1.8.5Thanks in advance for your help.
Not all triacs are built the same, so maybe some particular zones don’t work well with 2 parallel valves connected to it. Does it at least work with 1 valve? If you have run out of all spare zones, you can consider buying a zone expander to give you 16 extra zones, that way you don’t have to put two valves into the same zone.
Thank you Ray for responding. I do have several open zones (24 total zones with 10 used.) I haven’t tried to disconnect one of the valves yet (no time.) I have moved the valves to different zones to try to diagnose it. It was working fine for 4 years or so. Separating the valves is easier said than done, 150 feet of wire would need to be pulled I think. I’ll take a closer look tomorrow or Tuesday (day off) and I’ll let you know.
I would suggest at least pull one wire out so you can see if that zone can at least run one valve. If you have any spare zone, you can consider combining two zones into 1 to support two parallel valves. This does not require you to set up a complete new wires, instead, you insert one wire to zone x, the other to zone x+1, and you can set one of them (say zone x+1) as parallel (i.e. turn off ‘sequential’ flag). Then schedule both of them in a program. This way, the two run at the same time, so logically still one zone, but since they are one two separate triacs, the current capacity is doubled and should drive two solenoids successfully.
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