Only One Station Comes on?

This week I went to a property where there were 5 retic stations wired up, but only station 3 would come on.

As with all these problems it is important to begin at the controller and follow wiring and piping from there. I put the controller on station 1 and tested for voltage. There were no volts coming from terminal 1, but one station was definitely on as I was getting wet.

I did the same for station 2 – no volts, but the same station was stuck on.

Station 3 had volts and water from the same sprinklers

Station 4 & 5 had the same watering pattern but no volts.

My conclusion was that something had gone awry in the control box and it wasn’t sending power to the other stations to enable them to open. For some reason it was only powering up station 3.

So I switched the boxes over, ran a test and all was good as new.

Had we begun by chasing solenoids we would have spent a lot of time and gained nothing as the problem was located in the controller itself.