Ok, here are the photos of the two solenoid boxes and the parkway box. The parkway box is the one I think has a Febco type double check assembly. http://s1159.photobucket.com/albums/p632/texasf/
I have photos but I can't post them here. I took a pic of the parkway box assembly (that I believe is a Febco) and took it to setting 0 in my Photoshop elements. It is still 31k in size so the forum software won't accept it. I would be happy to send photos to anybody if there is a safe way to exchange email addresses.
I'll try to describe what I have. I have a Rainbird ESP-M controller in the garage mounted on the wall. There are 6 red/blue pairs of wires in there so yes, we got a 6 valve system. Out in the parkway next to the curb there is a large green box. It is only about 4 feet from the master water box (city). It has what appears to be the Febco Double Check Assembly. That is the box I call the master valve box. It has a blue handle in it (one of two) that I use to shut off the water to the whole system...
The very first night this happened, I unplugged the controller. All zones continued to run. Since then I have also turned off the main valve, unplugged the controller and then turned on the main valve. All zones turn on again. As I said before, all zones run no matter what I do with the controller: unplugged, manual operation, auto operation, on position, off position .... all zones run. Just today I found a second solenoid box in the front yard so now I have something else to work with. It's go...
My wife and I bought this house just over 8 months ago. The house was built in 1996. We required that the previous owner install a new controller which is a Rain Bird ESP-M. Due to the drought in Texas, we are under stage 3 watering restrictions so we can only run our system once every 2 weeks. About 6 weeks ago I turned on the system by starting each zone in order manually. Each zone was set to water about 6 or 7 minutes. A couple hours later I could hear the water running. I went out to check ...
