Rachio With FloLogic 2000 (no common wires)

I am trying to replace an old Rainbird RC-1260Bi with a Rachio. I have three bundles of wires which all seems straight forward enough but what is throwing me off is that common wires from each bundle are tied off to a speaker wire (???) that runs to a FloLogic 2000 system. The common wire from the Rainbird is capped off by itself.

Will this set-up work? I suppose I could start out by trying to just connect each of the zones and not touch the bundle of common wires. If that doesn’t work then try connecting each common and just discard the FloLogic wire (though I suspect that would make that system useless.) Any ideas?

Thanks!

Hey @Ajml45!

Just to be clear, there were no common wires going to your Rainbird? Were there any wires from your FloLogic to your RB? I think you should be good to go with just having no commons, I’m assuming that the FloLogic must provide the power to those, but I have never heard of a set up quite like this before!

McKynzee :rachio:

Thanks for your input! It appears the only connections to the Rainbird are the 12 zones (and two line inputs for AC). The common wire from the rainbird isn’t connected to anything. The three common from the irrigation lines are connected to a speaker wire which runs to the FloLogic (guessing this was a previous homeowner special.) Still can’t quite figure out in my head how this actually works but I think I will just connect the 12 zone wires to the Rachio, fire it up and see what happens.

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Sounds like a plan, keep us updated!

How is your flowlogic powered? Common on these controllers (including Rachio) is usually tied to one of the AC terminals (such as C terminal on the Rachio is usually tied to SP terminal which in itself tied to one of the AC input terminals). If your previous homeowner used an irrigation supply to power your flowlogic system, than an installer familiar with these systems may have realized that common is actually one of the AC inputs and decided against running another wire.

Some pictures would be nice :wink:

Gene

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It sounds like the FloLogic must be completing the circuit in some way, or else it would have been impossible for your Rainbird to run the zones. Maybe post some pictures? Or maybe you could describe how the FloLogic was originally wired in regards to the Rainbird.

Thank you everyone for your input! So… I went to give this a try tonight and I was missing some key information before. When I looked closer I saw that one of the speaker wires was connected to the common wire of the Rainbird (I missed this the first time because it was buried in the back.) The other speaker wire went to the three common wires in each of the bundles from the irrigation system. I hooked this up to Rachio in the same manner and it is working great. I really appreciate those who took the time to respond here are a few pictures in case it helps anyone in the future. (Ignore the mess on wires on finished product those could probably be cleaned up there are a whole lot of unused wires…) Also why there is speaker wire involved is beyond me, I am guessing maybe it was the only thing the previous owner had that was long enough.





Thanks for sharing those photos @Ajml45- glad to hear you are up and running :tada:!!