All zones stayed on all night

Loved the controller’s water saving feature and auto seasonal adjustments while it lasted. However Sunday night it went on a wild ride turning one after another zone ON and leaving them ON. In the morning 3 of 4 zones were left ON all night! So all my two year water savings were lost in single night. I unplugged the unit and thankfully all zones switched off but I haven’t tried plugging it back yet. I have lost the confidence to use this controller unsupervised at night. The software should have a fail safe power cut to the solenoid in case there were issues during watering cycle. Else we are losing the benefit of this wonderful idea.

When you unplugged the controller, were any lights blinking?

Did your app show active running zones?

No blinking lights, app status said “finished 21 minutes of watering cycle”

When you plug the controller back in, do the zones activate?

If you had multiple zones stuck on, it wasn’t the controller. It physically can’t/won’t run more than one at a time. You have a stuck valve somewhere. Usually the diaphragm inside them will wear out and stick open.

Disregard. I see that you said it shut everything off when unplugged. I still am not sold that it is a controller issue. Are you sure there hasn’t been a wiring problem that has risen?

Contact Rachio technical support. Was everything flooded? Since the controller can only operate one valve at a time, this a stuck valve issue or a wiring issue. How old is your system and what brand and model of valve do you have? A valve can easily be rebuilt without cutting it out if the valve is still on the market or repair parts are still avaiable.

Thanks everyone for pitching in. I will power it on again this weekend and update this post with results . One other thing that I forgot to mention was that the sprinklers were not on full throttle but close to 50% strength. I still doubt it has to do anything with valves since all zones switched off when I unplugged the unit. It’s a gen 1 rachio that I purchased in April of 2016.

Could you possibly have a main line break? Just thinking of another possible reason.

I powered on my controller today and tried manual cycle. I found out that while zones 1 & 2 are fine, zone 3 switches on both zones 2 & 3 which is why the sprinklers where not running full throttle. I tried to repeat the exercise with old rainbirrd controller and found same behavior. So we can rule it out as rachio issue. I will have my sprinkler guy look at the valves.

@stahuja - thanks for the update. If you have an ohm meter check the resistivity between the wires going to zone 2 and zone 3, as it may be a wiring fault.

@stahuja Thanks for the update. Does your system have a master valve? If so, activate an open terminal with no wire and see if any zones activate.