solenoids

Holidays started today and then I got a call… ‘Can you just come and wire up some solenoids for me? I haven’t a clue how these things work’. It was another landscaper but someone who wasn’t confident with retic.

‘Sure…’ I said. That’ll take 5 mins.

And then I got there and discovered he was in over his head. The pic above is the existing set up. You can see a master valve (left) and the two station valves. I expected to just be wiring up a new solenoid, but he couldn’t figure out how to get a new solenoid connected to the system, so the job became much bigger.

Normally an installer will leave 100ml between solenoids to allow for repairs and for the possibility of an add-on. But whoever did this packed it tight.

There was about 3cm of 25ml pipe going into one of the station valves that could be used, but because the valves were slip valves rather than BSP (threaded) we had to discard one whole solenoid and install a new one in its place. What was a simple job suddenly became more complicated and expensive.

What you see below is the final arrangement (viewed from the other side) – still pretty tight, but all able to removed and refitted if necessary now.