Zone fault/short

[roughyear]

Greetings all,

I have a Hunter irrigation system with 11 zones. I have one zone (#7- gray wire) that has some type of fault in it that keeps erroring out my system. I have 4 zones in the front yard (one box) , and the other 7 in the back yard (2 boxes , one with 5 solenoid the other with 2). The installers only used a 14 wire cable, thus I do not have another wire to test the system. I do have a Master Valve (in a separate box) , which is using one of the wires (yellow) .

I detach the gray wire off the #7 solenoid, and still get an error. I though maybe where the gray wire was spliced with the homerun wire in the front housing could be the problem, and decoupled the splice there, and still get an error. (thus the gray wire is NOT connected at all, but I still get the error/short-- actually disconnected in two spots , at the solenoid and at the first valve box/splice region)


I can plug another zone into the #7 on the controller, and that wire/zone will work.. it's this darn gray wire is the problem, and I can not figure out where the issue is. I checked all 3 housing units to see it the gray wire was cut or rusted , and it seems fine.


I just purchased/installed a new controller (Hunter X2 14 zone) as a just in case, and same problem/error, but with this X2 controller , it actually makes the whole system restart, whereas in the older Hunter Pro-C controller , it just hung on Zone 7 with the ERR.


Any ideas. I've had 2 people look at it, and they both scratched their heads with a "I don't know, must be a short".. smh, I know that. I've been trying to fix this for 2 years now, and nada.

 

[roughyear]

Ok.. I could NOT find the ground fault, but did figure out the problem was the wire from the controller to the 1st box where it's spliced. I ran a new wire and connected it to the splice and the zone activated. ... BUT , I wasn't in the mood to dig and bury 120-ft of wire, so I basically switched out the wire from one zone (flower bed #6) to the zone I need to water the grass (zone #7) , and the zone that has been dead for 3 years is now working...

Then, I connected the flower bed zone (#6) to another flower bed zone (#10) to activate at the same time (since I did not have any extra wires remaining), but now I have a water pressure issue, as there is not enough water pressure to make both flower bed zones rise and spray with the force necessary . Anyone have a solution for getting increased water pressure to both flower beds at the same time. ???

 

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[Drick]

If you don't want to dig you can buy a electronic transmitter/receiver that can connect both valves to one wire. The transmitter module connects at the timer and sends a message over the working wire to the receiver module in the valve box. This tells the recetver which valve to open. One such device is called Wire Sprout. I have not used it so I cannot attest to its durability/ reliability, but I have also seen other similar devices on the market that do the same thing.