Lately I’ve been having an issue when a zone will stop working. Iro thinks it’s running but the valve doesn’t actually turn on. Each time I unplug the power from the Iro, remove the faceplate and then put it back on and power it up. The first time this happened I doubled check all the wires, none were loose. This last time I didn’t, both times the zone started working again afterwards. I had manually verified all zones were working before this last issue and hadn’t touched anything since.
My Iro is a year old and didn’t have this problem until the last few weeks. Each time it’s been a different zone that stops working while the other 7 are unaffected. The only recent change was to start using all 8 zones, whereas I was only using 6 up until a month ago, though this affects both old and new zones.
@GregS Can you reach out to support@rachio.com and send wiring pictures? They might be able to help troubleshoot.
From what I’ve seen in the past it’s usually a faulty solenoid on a particular zone. In this case it seems random? Maybe someone on the forums much smarter than me has some ideas for other troubleshooting.
@GregS, I just replied to your support email but wanted to post here as well in case another user is having the same issues. I reviewed your device logs and noticed a reboot occurs on occasion after zone “Front/Main Lawn” is started. I believe this might be one of the two new zones you recently added to the system?
A simple test to start with would be to remove the wires for zones 7 & 8 from the wall mount and run the system for a day or two – long enough for a schedule to run automatically. This will let us see if we can replicate the issue. If not, the issue is likely due to wiring in zone 7 and/or 8.
For the benefit of others, after taking pictures of my wiring it became obvious that the insulation on my wires had degraded with bare wire exposed in many places, plus the connections weren’t using waterproof connectors. So I cut the bad ends off of the wires and re-did everything with waterproof connectors and put them in a junction box. The remaining exposed wires I covered with wiring conduit. All of this hopefully improves the quality of my connections and will make it last longer. It’s been over a week since I did this and so far my problem has not returned.
