Activating main valve alone?

[FosCo]

Hi,

my setup currently consists of 8 circuits and a main valve, controlled by a Rainbird RZXe.

Sometimes, I need to activate the main valve exclusively and no other.
Most of the time, only one valve and the main valve need to be activated, but sometimes the main valve alone needs to be activated.
This use case is unsupported by the Rainbird controller.

I tried to set up the demo website to this use case, but I wasn’t able to activate the main valve standalone.

Is there any option available? Did I miss something?

Or should I bring this up as a feature request?

Thanks,
Jonas

[Ray]

You can do so by using a spare zone (you don’t need zone expander, you can simply enable more zones in Edit Options -> Station Handling, OpenSprinkler allows you to set more logical zones than the number of physical zones you may have). The spare zone can serve as a ‘dummy’ zone to activate master.

[FosCo]

Hi Ray, thanks for the quick answer!

The virtual dummy zone is the perfect solution then.

Wouldn’t I need the zone expander anyway with 9 electrical valves? It’s 15 zones unused “spare” but I do not see any other possibility…

[Ray]

No, you do not need expander unless if you need those zones physically. OpenSprinkler allows you to set more zones than there are physically, because a zone can be a ‘virtual zone’, such as you can set it up as HTTP zone, remote zone, RF zone etc. In your case, the dummy zone is just used to activate the master zone. If you do not want to see those unused zones on the screen, you can disable them — click the ‘gears’ icon next to a zone name, and click ‘disabled’, that way it will be hidden from the UI.

[FosCo]

I need 9 valve outputs physically, including the main valve.

[FosCo]

Anyway, just ordered the combination of opensprinkler 3.0, zone expander and as a bonus for some later remote fruit extension the bee version.

Now going on a hunt for a decent European ac power solution and 3 latching solenoids for the fruit extension with the bee…

[Author]

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