Station run time significantly longer than manually set (BUG?)

[John K]

I am having some weird behavior with one of my controllers. First some background info on this controller. It is the latest version hardware (3.2 AC) and firmware (2.1.9 (2)) and has 53 stations wired in. Ethernet wire plugged in and powered by 24vac transformer that provides 1.6 VA on a 14 gauge wire about 100ft away. I just recently switched this controller from a previous version of OpenSprinkler and so all the wiring of the solenoids and zones have been in uses for several years with out issue. Each zone has a 1 amp inline fuse connected to it (to prevent zones from being burned out when a solenoid goes bad). The inline fuse set up is new from this year, as well as the rather long power cable. Before switching over controllers, I made a back up and restored on to the new controller. It restored a bit strangely in that the programs lost most of their names but all else seemed fine. Example, name was “GH #1-7 BASKETS” and what was transferred over was “GH”

PROBLEM
I have been manually turning on zones through the front page of the mobile app as well as through the run-once program page. If I set a zone to run for 6 minutes, for example, it runs for 6 mins. Except for when it doesn’t and instead runs for a nonsensical amount of time. I have had this happen on 3 to 4 different occasions where I noticed a zone still running (water coming out of the sprinkler) and realized it has been far longer than the 6 minutes that I had set. I check the logs and see that the particular station had run for 19 mins and 2 seconds by the time that I realized and hit the “stop all stations” command. On another occasion a different zone ran for over an 1 hour, another occasion for 25 mins and 17 seconds. Examples of logs below.

Something to note. This is happening to different solenoid valves which are on different wires all together as well as being wired in to different expansion boards. When I go to test the stations that ran for these un specified times, they behave correctly. I set 30 seconds and they run 30 seconds. I have no idea what triggers this.

This strikes me a some kind of bug in the software of the controller, not a hardwire, wiring issue. This never happened to me with the previous version of the OpenSprinkler controller at this location. Overall, I have 7 controllers running from old to new and haven’t seen this before.

Not sure if this is relevant but I did notice the newest version reports the currant being used in mA, nice feature, but seems to cause the controller to freeze if I run a zone and disconnect/reconnect the solenoid wiring to said zone while it is still running. Old system never had issue with hot swapping a valve like that.

The behavior seems as though the controller is getting hung up/freezing and then waking up again when I re open the app to address the “why is this valve still running?!?” problem. I don’t see a cause that I can replicated the problem with. I need help!

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