Pump Relay On/Off Option by Zone?

I run a Rachio 16 zone, and 9 of the zones are feed by a big well pump and a high pressure booster pump that is turned on by the Rachio Controller “M” terminal. But I also have 2 zones for micro watering flower pots that are connected to the house faucet garden hose at lower pressure. When I run those 2 zones, the booster pressure pump starts up and overheats as it has no where to send the water.

Can Rachio make the pump / master valve option only kick-in for specific zones? There is lots of smaller flower basket zones, where I don’t want the booster on.

Seems like a simple software fix.,

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We have very different problems, but I believe that we need the same solution; see

If we don’t see a better answer on this board, three possible solutions come to mind:

  1. A script that monitors Rachio activity and modifies the Advanced Wiring setting accordingly. This could run on a local machine or in the cloud.
  2. A relay that operates on specific zone(s) and breaks the connection to the pump relay.
  3. As above, but using a triac, assuming that the ~1 V drop in the on state does not prevent the pump relay from operating reliably.

Great idea with the second relay. Those standard automotive 5 pin BOSCH type relays have both a NO and NC setup and are availble in 24vdc for less than $10.00

I can put a bridge rectifer in front of it to take the Rachio 24vac to DC and hook it up on the same zone as my low pressure zones that don’t need the Rachio M terminal to start up the pump relay. Rachio will still always turn on the M terminal, but for my low pressure zones the M wire will be routed through the new zone relay which will be NC normally closed. When that zone turns on, the new relay will open the circuit to rhe pump relay and makes sure it doesnt run. i can power to 4 valves on a Rachio zone. so 1 valve a NC relay will be no problem. The new relay will be small enough to fit inside the 120v pump relay box! All other zones will still have the pump relay turn on since the M wire is passing through NC relay of the low presure zone that is off.

Software fix would still be better.

I wrote a simple perl script to run zones without the pump and posted in the thread linked in my earlier post. I believe that it can be easily adapted to your setup. For example, if you want to run (with the pump off) zone 11 for 10 minutes and zone 12 for 20 minutes, replace the ‘business logic’ at the end of the script with:

run1('false', 11, 10 * 60);
run1('false', 12, 20 * 60);
run1('true', 12, 0); #re-enable pump for regular Rachio runs

Run the script manually to test. Once working, set it up as a cron job (Mac, Linux) or Scheduled Task (Windows). Make sure that it runs at a time that won’t conflict with regular runs.

Let me know of any issues.