Fixed my retic! Part 1

Oooh, finally. The retic just stopped coming on, took me a couple of weeks to realise the grass was dying and I hadn’t heard the retic going! So then the troubleshooting began. Dug up the wiring and solenoids, pulled joins apart, no luck. Error message on the controller indicated the transformer had blown so I made appointment for the retic specialists to come and fix it. Then I decided, well if the transformer is gone, why cant I just replace the transformer? They don’t do that, it’s a throw away job, just buy a new controller. Meh, ok, so then I think I can buy a new controller and plug it in, mount it on the wall, why pay a retic specialist to swap over a controller box? So I went and bought a new controller for $169, got it home, programmed it up, plugged it in to test it out… nothing. Still getting an error message and obviously a short somewhere as the controllers fuse blew.

So the wiring appeared to be fine, has to be a faulty solenoid, so pulled them out, took them down to the retic shop, both working perfectly. Back to wiring and the only bit I cant “see” is the bit thats under the pavers in condute. Surely the fault isn’t there, but to test I bypassed all of the old wiring, put a cable over ground, hooked it up and presto!!

Great that I got it to work, but then I had to pull up the old underground cable and feed the new cable through the condute. Piece of cake if you tie a piece of string to the old cable before you pull it through, then attach the new cable to the string and pull it back! Hooked it up again to test, still worked perfectly, yay! Lastly waterproof all the joins, bury the solenoids again, and re-test, yay. Set the controller to Auto and the retic should come on next Monday morning at 6am.

PS Monday – retic not working, had blown another fuse. I’m not looking forward to digging it all up again, but I will eventually. Until then I can turn it on manually by opening a solenoid. Hmmm