Replacement says it's watering, but it's not

I receive a warranty replacement Iro this past Friday and installed it. @franz copied over all of my zones to the new controller. I even did some manual runs to make sure it was all working - and it was.

I set up a flex schedule through the flex-app site. It was all set showing that all of my 9 zones were scheduled to be watered this morning starting at 5am.

I woke up to a bone dry yard and my phone had the usual push notification telling me the schedule was to be run per usual. Although the app shows no activity whatsoever - just a normal online Iro.

The web app (app.rachi.io) says it’s still watering zone 1 (over two hours later) and yet nothing is happenening. I unplugged and rebooted the Iro. If I try to run a manual zone from the app, the blue light comes on, but nothing happens. The web app won’t let me do anything because it thinks my unit is still watering.

So between this and the broken unit just replaced, my yard has missed sever waterings in a row - I’ve had to resort to manually turning on/off my zones at the valves with a stopwatch.

Please help!

This sounds like a wiring problem between the Iro and the valves. Since all of valves are not working the culprit is likely the common wire. Get a multimeter ($10) and check the voltage at the valve box. If you don’t have 24 volts then you have a wiring issue.

@Khillski, thanks, but I’m pretty sure this is not a wiring issue. On Friday, I was able to manually run my zones from the iPhone app. And right now the web app and the iphone app are show two different states of my system (web app thinks it’s still watering, iphone says it’s idle). There’s something else going on.

@steve28 I am starting to agree with @Khillski. I think the previous unit was working correctly, this unit is displaying the same unexplainable behavior.

In addition to @Khillski suggestion, if you can send wiring pictures to [support@rachio.com] they can help troubleshoot.

It’s seems too coincidental to have two units with the exact behavior. .

:cheers:

@steve28 Also, one simple test with the Gen 1 is to unplug the unit, detach the faceplate, plug the unit back in, set a schedule to run in a couple mintues, and watch the behavior. This will help determine if there is some wiring short or not.

:cheers:

@franz - this isn’t the same behavior. The previous unit, as soon as the schedule was supposed to start, the unit would go offline and the wifi light would flash red and stay that way for days. This one stays online (green solid light).

And besides, why does the web app think it’s still watering???

@steve28 One last thing, I’ve reached out to our support team who will ask you for wiring pictures and can take it from here.

Thanks.

:cheers:

@franz, I appreciate that, but I literally haven’t touched the wiring in 18 months (when I got the replacement, I just switched the faceplates).

Can you at least tell me what your logs say (i.e., why does it think it’s still watering??)

Because the unit can’t communicate out to tell it has stopped, something seems to be shorting on the unit.

I’m going to let support take over from here, too difficult to troubleshoot on the forum.

@franz ok copy

I helped a friend with a similar intermittent valve problem. He had a Rainbird ESP and it wouldn’t activate the valves some of the time. Come to find out that after a rain or a watering cycle his common wire was shorting out due to moisture in the wire nuts. It would also show the fault light on the ESP. I don’t know but I would think that the Iro has a fault circuit so that if a valve shorts it doesn’t take the Iro out with it. That could cause the reboot of the Iro or other behaviors. Just a few thoughts.

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Yeah, I’m working it with support for now. I’ll let everyone know what the issue was when we figure it out.

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Just to follow up here… so after debugging today with Krista in support, it appears we solved the issue.

It began as one day when my schedule (that had been in place for months) was supposed to run, my unit went offline and would just sit there with red flashing light. If I rebooted a bunch of times, it would sometimes come back, but as soon as I started the schedule, it would go red again. The final time, it just stayed red flashing - never came back.

Rachio sent me a replacement under warranty. I hooked it up, ran a few manual zones - all appeared normal. Then this morning when my schedule was supposed to run, it just didn’t, although it said it did.

@franz had Krista from support reach out to me and we did some debugging. Turns out I had a borderline solenoid (was showing 18 ohms of resistance when it should have been 45 or so). This was low enough to manifest as a short. A short will make the unit go offline, but it’s supposed to come back and continue with the next zone. Apparently, rarely, instead of coming back, it will enter an infinite reconnect loop (green flashing light).

Replacing the solenoid (lucky I had one on hand) and rebooting fixed the issue! So in the end it was a combo of broken controller (red flashing forever), followed by the rare-but-happens infinite loop of the replacement controller all in response to the borderline solenoid.

Thanks to @franz and Krista from support for taking care of all of this on a Sunday. My next scheduled watering day is Tue… fingers crossed!

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I had the same thing happen. Every time my first zone would start it would disconnect from Wifi and I’d have to reset it. I finally tracked it down to a shorted solenoid. I’m rather amazed that Rachio wouldn’t put protection in for a shorted solenoid (yes I realize it didn’t blow the xformer or unit out) but it would have been nice if they would have just had the status light blink some code and keep watering without disconnecting wifi. I guess now that I know this happens I can check by process of elimination. Does Gen 2 work any better?