Master not turning on when rain detected

[clynch]

I am running firmware 2.1.4. I have a program that is set to NOT use weather adjustment. I can see the station activate when rain is detected but the master valve doesn’t activate with it. Obviously I get no water! I just have the system set to not detect rain currently but would like to use rain detection soon.

Am I missing a setting? I swear this used to work last season…

[Ray]

The first thing you should check is whether the station is set to activate the master station. So click on the ‘Settings’ icon next to the station to bring up the station properties dialog, and see if the ‘Activate Master’ checkbox is on or not.

Also, please note that ‘Use Weather Adjustment’ is different from ‘rain sensor’. ‘Use Weather Adjustment’ means the watering time of the program will be multiplied by the watering percentage. You said ‘when rain is detected’ — I assume you have a rain sensor connected to OpenSprinkler. That’s independent of ‘Use Weather Adjustment’ — a station can be set to ‘Ignore Rain’ even if the program where it’s in doesn’t use weather adjustment.

Other than these, I can’t think of any reason why the master is not activated. The way master station is handled is different from other stations — it’s not affected by the rain sensor directly, instead, the algorithm turns on the master station if any station that associates master station is on. Rain sensor only affects non-master stations directly.

[clynch]

Thanks for the response Ray. There are checks next to ‘Use Master’ and ‘Ignore Rain’ for this station. To test I am toggling the ‘Normally Open’ box under weather settings to make the system think the rain sensor has been tripped. When I manually activate the station it turns green and I expect the valve for this station is physically open but Master remains red and the master valve remains closed. I did try to uncheck and recheck the ‘Use Master’ and ‘Ignore Rain’ boxes but that didn’t fix the problem. This station DOES activate the Master valve when rain is not detected.

This worked with previous firmware so I’m thinking it is in software. But I’m not ruling out that it could be user error! I didn’t mention in my original post, hardware version is 2.1.

[clynch]

I should also add that I don’t think weather adjustment has anything to do with the problem. I had forgotten where to find the ignore rain toggle. Ignore rain, however, IS checked. I also tried resetting the configuration to default thinking maybe something bad happened when I imported my old config. Still get the same results. The master valve won’t come on when OS detects rain.

Thanks for looking into it! Let me know if I need to do some testing from my side.

[Ray]

OK, this is likely a firmware bug. I will try to reproduce it and if confirmed will provide a fix right away.

[clynch]

Thanks Ray. I appreciate how responsive you are to this forum.

[Ray]

So I am able to reproduce this problem. The issue has to do with the fact that the the rain sensor checking is not bypassing master station when it should. The work around is as follows:
1) go to Edit Options and disable Master (i.e. select Master as None)
2) Now the master station becomes a normal station, you can edit its attribute and turn on the ‘Ignore Rain’ flag.
3) go back to Edit Options and enable Master (i.e. select a Master station)

This should fix the issue for now. We will address this in the next firmware 2.1.5. Thanks.

[clynch]

That took care of it. Thanks a lot Ray.

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