Sprinkler not closing latching valves.

[CraterMountain]

Hi all, I have been having some very strange problems with my OS v3 hardware. It’s running in a remote paddock off a battery with solar to charge it. There is a pair of Ubiquiti NanoStations 2.4Ghz creating a bridge back to the internet in our shed about 2km away. There is a small wireless hotspot in the enclosure with the open sprinkler that it connects to and it also allows me to use my phone in the paddock to connect to it. It worked well for several months, but recently I have been having strange problems.

After lots of troubleshooting, I think I’ve identified two different issues.
1. Sometimes I will run a program and the controller just gives up after a few stations (sometimes only one). There are 6 stations on my network and it may do 1, or 3 or all 6 if I am lucky.
2. The other is that often it won’t switch off the latching valves. It will happily turn them on, but I often have to manually run them again manually for a few seconds to make them turn off. The logs show that the station was run, but it doesn’t actually turn off, which wastes a lot of water (it all comes from a tank so it’s critical not to empty it).

Has anyone ever seen anything like this? I think problem 1 has something to do with the network. If the network is dropped for even a few seconds while a program is running, it seems to wipe the rest of the program and even if the network comes back it doesn’t resume and valves can be left open! I thought the scheduling of values would be totally independent of the network, but it appears not. I have now set all devices to fixed IP’s to avoid and DHCP issues etc, I will see if that helps in the next few days.

Problem 2 has got me stumped. I have tried replacing the controller with another OpenSprinkler 3 that I had, replaced the battery (even though charge was good at all times), replaced all solenoids, replaced the power regulator to the OS unit (supplying 8v currently), replaced the hotspot at the paddock end and the router in the shed and it just keeps happening.

I am wondering if problem 2 might be heat related? The OS is in an enclosure in the middle of a paddock and we live in the tropics so it can get very hot. I have tried running during the cool of the night, but that didn’t seem to make much difference. Perhaps the heat from the devices in the enclosure is the problem? I added a computer cooling fan today, so I will see how that goes.

Another thought was that maybe it needs to send longer pulses to the soleniods to turn off. Is there any way to change that?

Any suggestions would be welcome.

[CraterMountain]

Looks like I’m the only one having these issues :-). Just in case anyone else comes across this post, here are some findings so far.

For the first problem, I have set the OSv3 unit to have a fixed IP. It was already a ‘reserved IP’ in my router settings, but the settings on the unit itself were DHCP. I changed to fixed with the same reserved IP as I had on my router. So far so good, the last few programs have run without errors.

For the second issue, I added a fan as mentioned, but that just draws down my battery too fast, so will ditch that idea. I found a setting called Boost time, which I increased to 800. This has helped and most of the solenoids turn off reliably. However, one particular station was only turning off every second time I ran it (very strange!) so I moved the wire to a different spare station and it’s so far working fine. I guess the original station port had something wrong with it.

[jaycan]

Hi,

I use ethernet connection and experienced regular controller lockups/crashes/freezes with similar outcome. I assume you could not connect to the controller at all when this happens. You might want to try my solution in a similar thread.

https://opensprinkler.com/forums/topic/controller-lockups-crashes/page/6/#post-71230

Let us know how you go.

Cheers!

[Ron95030]

Hi:
Sorry this is so late (only 18 mo.) I’m browsing these forums. Who knows if you’ll find this or not…

You’ve replaced and tested with everything that’s involved except the wiring from the controller to the valves.
If you are doing a long run and using telephone wire or some thin stuff, bite the bullet and get some proper #18 AWG sprinkler wire.
Long runs with thin wire will reduce the voltage needed to pull in the solenoid, or once pulled in you may be losing voltage across a bad connection. Did you solder them or use wire nuts? Are the weather protected?
Just a thought.
Ron

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