After determining that the controller was defective, I have installed the new unit Rachio sent.
With everything set up correctly again, the new unit works as it should. The new Rainbird RSD-BEx wired rain sensor connected to the 2 yellow terminals. Rain sensor option selected in the app.
This morning it rained about 1/2 inch. The new unit reported rain sensor activated 3 times. What is going on here?
It should at least report rain sensor deactivated in between. The sensor basically breaks the connection. It would only do that once when the felt discs in the rain sensor expand.
I’m wondering given what I saw while reconnecting last weekend whether rachio is less tolerant of a “flicker” that might occur when the sensor is just in the limit of range, or has a battery that is failing. Either of these scenarios would have the normally closed sensor deactivate, and if it really was active, would re-activate with connection.
I received the activation notices of the rain sensor 3x’s yesterday. It did rain so I expected it to go off, but to tell me it’s active 3x’s within a few hours is not right. Now It did skip my flex schedule for today because of the rain yesterday, as it should have, but why would I get an activation notices 3x’s.
See screenshot:
As you can see, it "activated at 5:30PM, 7:18 PM, and again at 7:35 PM last night. Something flaky is definitely going on . Hopefully it will deactivate sometime today.
Okay, just removed the sponges and cleaned them. When I removed them. The sensor de-activated. After adding them back, it went active again.
I am hoping it dries out overnight so the system runs in the morning. I’ll keep an eye out for another de-activation notice this evening.
Some of the sponges looked beat up. Are they replaceable or not even worth replacing? I have been looking into the the wireless sensors and this might be a good time to buy one…
Okay, sensor was cleaned and setup again on Thursday. As you can see, I was getting multiple notifications of activated and de-activated over the weekend. It finally seemed to stop at 2:16 PM yesterday.
Something is definitely going on here. It should not be the wiring or a dirty sensor as I have cleaned mine and the sensor has been fine up until a few weeks ago…
As an aside, I did order a new wireless rain sensor because the one I have is fairly old.
I found power cycling the Iro solved this for me. Brand new system install today with rain this evening. The notifications kept reading actived/deactivated every few minutes. I tested continuity on the sensor disconnected from the Iro as well as the voltage output of S1 & SC. Both S1 & SC read ~27v which leads me to believe the sensor input is more than likely a digital input not a hard wire interlock. After the reboot I tested with a jumper than reconnected the rain sensor and got a steady actived state that hasn’t toggled since. Hope this helps someone else.
Seems as the rain sensor is a bit sensitive or we have large rain drops here in Houston. One fortunate thing with all this rain is it has given me several chances to verify the sensor. It seems during the initial rainfall the rain drops hit the needle on top of the mini click causing the alternating status’s. Once the sensor becomes saturated the active status sticks until it drys out. So all is well after the reboot.
Im having same issues and it is FRUSTRATING to say the least. Was working fine all of last year and beginning of this year but now constant barage of notifications without any Deactivated messages. I dont think its a clean out issue as I (and many others on this thread) have tried it. Please take a look and let us know how to solve this issue which is effecting multiple users.
I too experienced this problem in the past. I have a wireless rain sensors Irritrol RS1000. I as well took it apart to clean, I also changed out the two batteries 3V CR2032 batteries. Reassembled and haven’t had any of the repeated issues since.
