Sounds good, thanks for the info. Looking forward to hear if replacing it does the trick.
It’s good that you bought a whole new valve. Best to rebuild it.
That valve is a Weathermatic Silver Bullet. I rebuild those all the time. They are known to stick open. I’ve found that the diaphragm ports, on older diaphragms especially, will swell shut causing it to stick open. Sometimes debris causes this too. Some of those valves will also start to scream like a banshee trying to close when they start to fail.
You could also use an eighteen gauge copper wire and push it through the two ports on the diaphragm to give it a little more life in a pinch, but it would fail again eventually. Go ahead be ready for the other’s to fail too.
I know you’ve already taken the valve apart, so you noticed this already, but it may help someone else. When the valve’s apart, be careful to notice the o-ring on the solenoid port or in the valve body. The new valve will have an o-ring too. Only use one o-ring. Use the new one. Also make sure the manual on/off lever is horizontal (off), not perpendicular (on) to the valve. Have fun!
@mckynzee @Sprinklerman @DLane,
Thanks for all of your help! I replaced all the top half components of the value including the upper valve housing… I have run a handful of tests:
- manually activate the valve via the solenoid bypass lever - works perfectly
- manually activate the valve through Rachio app and stop/close valve - works perfectly
3 schedule the zone to run - started and stopped with the schedule
Very happy and relieved.
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I’ve been running with Weathermatic Nitro N-100 valves on my 32-zone residential system since 2003. My experience over these 14 years has been miserable at best.
From my experience, the following are ways these valves fail open:
- solenoid failure. older, black-wire solenoids would fail causing stuck open zones. Weathermatic sent out 32 replacements @ no charge but labor was not covered
- cross-threading of solenoid on valve body. few and tiny plastic threads are employed on the solenoids and when working in a muddy hole are easy to cross-thread
- clogged ports on the diaphragm. these are tiny and susceptible to minerals in the water as well as rubber deterioration. these failures started about when i had all the solenoids finally replaced and continue today
In all of my ownership experience with these valves, I have never been able to run my system reliably and for more than a week or two w/o having to repair some component to stop a zone that didn’t shut off.
I had this problem today. Turning off the power did not work. Turning off the zone with the Rachio app did not work. I went outside to where the valves were located but saw that the valves were not labeled. So using the Rachio app, I cycled each zone on/off to determine which valve belonged to each zone. Luckily and thankfully, cycling on/off the zones somehow turned off the zone/valve that was stuck. Someone told me that the valve for that zone needed to be replaced.
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I have this problem when I use the rachio app. one zone starts running and won’t stop when i use the rachio app to water a different zone. How do I fix this?
@franz I am a new Rachio customer. I purchased the Rachio to save a percentage on my water bills.
I have the same issue just a week after installing the controller, where zone 1 won’t turn off. Even when I change the wiring so that “real” zone 1 is controlled by zone 2 on the controller, zone 1 still won’t turn off.
I never had any issues with the old controller, but from all the threads I’m reading it seems that Rachio controllers are basically too weak (in voltage) to reliably close the solenoids that old-school controllers close just fine. Just had a sprinkler expert check out the valves today and he saw no issues with zone 1’s valve. (FYI I don’t know how to tell if my valves are AC or DC but nowhere in the app setup or on the instructions did it warn me clearly about that.)
Between the time spent debugging this issue, the already-wasted water from the zone running for hours while I was out for the weekend until a neighbor called me to report it, and the future risk of that happening again, is there any way I can keep my Rachio?
I’m just not willing to invest hours and hours needlessly cleaning valves or doing all kinds of back and forth with support just to make this high-tech controller work - but don’t get me wrong I love what you guys are doing and will eventually switch once the bugs are worked out. For now I’m planning to return to Costco but if you can provide me with some easy options to try before going this route, I’d be willing to try them. Thank you.
You were misinformed about how irrigation valves work. While there are DC latching valves designed for low voltage battery controllers, Rachio (and likely your old controller) is designed for a more common 24VAC valves. These valves need energy to turn ON and stay ON, but the only way to turn them off is to shut the power off delivered to the valve, at that point there is an internal spring that actually turns off the valve.
What kind of valve is it? Orbit, rain bird, etc…? If your expert already took apart the valve to make sure that there are no debris interfering with the valve operation, than likely the solenoid on the valve needs to be replaced, either due to a worn out spring and/or the rubber gasket on the end of the plunger.
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Thanks Eugene. After six years of owning my home, why would the solenoid decide to break just at the same time as I switch controllers? That seems very unlikely.
Also I forgot to mention, the Rachio controller is able to turn off the zone about one in three times. So when I manually cycle it on and off, one or two times it won’t turn off even though the app says it’s off, but then when I turn it on again and off again it will turn off sometimes. It’s haphazard.
The guy was going to charge me $100 to take apart the valve and inspect for debris, but he said he can usually tell by how it feels when it turns on and off while holding his hand on the valve whether there’s any debris or issues with it, and he said it felt totally smooth when it turned on and off and he didn’t hear anything or see anything to indicate otherwise. That was enough for me, coming from an expert, to know that the problem is almost definitely with the digital controller.
Unless I hear any other tips in the next day or two, I will switch back to my old controller and see how things run. I’m betting there will be zero problems.
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I only speak from experience. I have a master valve, so one of the valves getting stuck was not a big issue, what started to happen is that after one particular zone would run, later zones would trigger a leak detection and disable themselves to prevent water loss. Manually turning the solenoid on the valve to cycle it would fix the issue, until the zone ran again.
I’ve took the valves apart, did not find any debris, and the issues continued. Finally I discovered that the spring came loose from the plunger, after I reattached it the issues have stopped.
I have orbit valves, personally I’m somewhat disappointed with how loosely the spring is attached to the plunger. If the problem returns soon, I may end up switching the valve for a different brand.
Here is a video about how the solenoids work, pay attention to the spring, it is responsible for moving the plunger & seal back into place, after the controller stops holding it in the ON position.
There is nothing the controller can do in order to help the spring to close the valve, if it resumes power delivery to the valve, it would act against the spring and open the valve instead of closing it.
I have the same issue. I only have 4 zones, they all worked fine with the previous controller. After I installed the Rachio 3 controller, I was able to start and stop all of them. The first few days it worked fine, then eventually one of the zones stopped shutting off. I know Rachio will tell me to do the things above, and I will certainly waste my time doing it, but all four zones are relatively new. I mean by using occam’s razor, it appears all people posting had well functioning sprinkler systems with the old controllers, and all of a sudden when they switched to Rachio, a zone starts failing (the interesting things is, that NOT ALL zones fail, but a single one, and I am also curious if it is the last one in sequence? first one? how much power is sent initially by the controller, how much at the end, is it stable? etc.). I think Rachio needs to look into their complaints database and recreate the issue, as even if something fails outside of their device, it appears that their device is the original culprit, and none of us had the issue until the switch to Rachio.
In statistics, when you study the cause and effect, you have to learn that correlation does not imply causation (wiki link).
Valves which do not “shut off” do not usually fail completely. What usually happens is the time to turn off is increased, meaning the valve may take 5, 10 or some other number of minutes after it is dis-energized to actually turn off. During the regular schedule, when you are not paying attention to the irrigation, you are unlikely to even notice the increased runtime, meanwhile after a new system is installed and you have a clear indication of when the valve should start & stop, all of a sudden issues are apparent.
Rachio controller is using the AC supply to power the valves. You can use a multi-meter in order to measure the voltage output of the supply and let us know if it is much higher than 24VAC.
P.S. Solenoid valves, which is what Rachio is designed to control, are actually a natural anti-surge devices. The coil inside the solenoid is an inductor (link), which is a type of device which works against a quickly changing current, such as a surge when the valve is turned ON. Personally I believe that any power issues would primarily effect established customers, whereas valves which are turned ON on a daily basis would start failing, rather then those the controller turned on for the first time.
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Gene, I understand that correlation doesn’t imply causation, but people in this forum seem very convinced that it must be the fault of the sprinkler system and not the conotroller even though our systems ran and shut off just fine before we switched controllers.
I’ll switch back to my old controller today just to be sure it isn’t the system, and I’ll post back.
Currently i’m able to reliably reproduce the zone 1 not shutting off about 1/3 of the time when using manual run in Rachio.
OK, so when that happens, disconnect the zone 1 wire at the controller. If it doesn’t stop watering, the valve is almost certainly bad.
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@jaydge88 Alas you guys are not the first to think that their new controller is the source of troubles. I dare say not a month goes by where we are not helping troubleshoot a new install. Controller is rarely a source. Circuit Rachio uses to control the valves is relatively simple (just a triac with a surge suppressor), and issues with the controller show up as a zone not turning on, rather than turning off. Looking forward to seeing how well the valve works with your old controller. Make sure to run it at least 10 times to make sure you catch a 1 in 3 chance of the valve not working.
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I have had a Rachio 3e controller operating 3 zones, 1-2 and 3 for about a month now. It has been working great until last week, when zone one would not turn off. After reading the posts in this forum, I determined the solenoid was bad and replaced it a few days ago and it was working fine again. Fast forward to today and zone one is again not turning off. I have 2 Lawn Genie Electric siphon irrigation valves and one orbit… The Lawn Genie on Zone 1 is the one that I keep having problems with. Any suggestions as to what the problem might be?
@brian61 - another possibility is dirt in the valve. Flush out the valve or replace the innards of the valve.
So you mean to tell me that everyone including myself who installed a rachio controller and had zone 1 stuck open only after switching controllers is not evidence that something is flaky with the rachio controller? Seems like cop out to me. Why would every single person posting have the same issue with zone 1 being stuck open? That is not simply a mere coincidence but evidence of a flaw with the rachio controller.