Zone Fault Detection not working for some kinds of faults?

I had 5 zones stop working last week without any zone detection faults being registered in the log. I finally began to investigate when things starting looking very dry…
What I found was:

  • Output voltages looked good at the controller - 27-28V.
  • One zone valve that I checked was only receiving 19-20V AC
  • After probing around I determined that my common line feeding the 5 zones must have a bad connection, but was not completely broken.
    Fortunately, I had another nearby common line (this is a 200ft run so really lucky) to wire to, that fixed everything.

So my question/comment is “Why didn’t the Rachio detect this problem ?”. There should be a way to set an alarm for low valve current on a valve by valve basis to find this kind of thing.

The zone detection faults only alert you when there is a problem significant enough to cause the device to shutdown/power cycle itself in order to protect it from potential damage, and even then if the problem can be isolated to a particular zone. Our support agents can see the current values for every zone terminal, but not the common terminals and anything wired into the M terminal at this time. Hopefully we will have that ability sometime in the near future!

Thanks. I did contact support and they were able to point me to one valve that was not triggering due to a loose common wire (I had missed this one when I fixed the other 4 zone). Support person was able detect but Rachio controlled did not alert to a fault, so there is room to improve fault detection and isolation.

From support - "You’re welcome. First off, I noticed zone 2 is reading like the circuit is incomplete. This may be due to a loose connection or break in wire for this zone. "

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Glad they were able to help! Considering the common is what completes the circuit, the current values for zone 2 that the agent noticed probably stemmed from the common itself. Let us know if you come across any additional problems.