SPRINKLER TALK FORUM - You Got Questions, We've Got Answers

is the main water supply turned on?if you don't know if there is a master valve check the terminals of the controller,there should be a terminal mv if there is a wire hooked up to it ,it should be a master valve,then you know you have one somewhere.

Sam,

I would troubleshoot the entire system from the water source all the way to the zone heads. If the system is hooked-up to a municipal water system, I would call the city and have it flow checked at the meter for starters.

This is a strange but true story of what happened to me several years ago:

I installed a system for a customer and designed the entire system with a hydraulic software program I built for computing PSI, water velocity, etc (before the days you could commercially buy a software design program). Anyway, I hooked the system up to an existing 3/4" meter, built the entire system, and fired it up - nothing but little spurts of water came out of the heads!! After hours of me being "firmly insistent" with our municipal water provider, I finally convinced a city supervisor to cut the street and check the tap on the water main. I was able to troubleshoot that either I had a very big rock in the sprinkler supply main (which I didn't believe was true), or the tap under the street was bad. Sure enough, a 1" "molycock" tap had corroded down to about 5% of the original opening 8' under the street. The city fixed it at no charge...

Some cities used "molycocks" back in the 1960's and early 1970's because they were cheaper than pure-copper cocks. If your home is a 60's or 70's vintage, I would find out from the city if molycocks were ever used.

Now the funny part was - the tap restriction was not bad enough to be noticed in the shower, washing machine, kitchen, etc, but a sprinkler system flowing at 15GPM overwhelmed its very limited capacity and exposed the problem.

Something to think about...

Sam,

Normally, unless you are pretty sure of where the problem lies the best troubleshooting procedure is to start at the water source and work your way to the heads. Because your house is of modern construction, I would say the city tap is ok because that kind of corrosion takes years (or decades) to develop.

Brass shutoff gate valve stems will also sometimes break off and the partially to fully-closed gate will shut down the water supply. I see that you already have a corroded gate valve and I would recommend that be replaced anyway with a good nylon/pvc unit. You might just have to turn the water off to the system someday anyway!

Because you have an existing system that presumably worked well at one time, I would suspect a bad gate valve or bad master valve. In short - it sounds very much like something just broke, and that will really narrow down your search to pinpoint the problem. I would check the gate valve, master valve, backflow device, and zone valves - in that order.

Controllers do go bad on occasion - especially after a nearby lightning strike, but the culprit is usually the wiring. It's usually fairly easy to see if controller microchips are fried from lightning because you usually (but not always!) can't program them. I know of cases where lightning has done some really bizzare things to controllers, wiring, and valves (i.e: shorting out a single zone when all other zones work fine).

From everything you have described, I would say you are looking at a mechanical failure - not electrical...

Let me know how it all turns out...