Does anyone else see a problem here?
Sprinklers? Water? Electrical lines? Just a-dangling in the wind? My front sprinklers have been connected to the controller in the backyard via this method since I moved in two years ago. Surprisingly, I have had no problems.
Until last week.
I do not know when it started, exactly. All I know is my front yard started looking brown and, when I went to investigate, I discovered the orange electrical caps scattered on the ground and the wires dangling in the wind, completely disconnected.
At first I blamed vandals. You know, “those damn kids!” But then I realized, 1) the few kids we have in the neighborhood are generally well behaved, and 2) who is going to vandalize sprinkler wires? It would be much more fun to break the actual sprinkler pipe and send water gushing into the air. I do not think vandals have the patience to disconnect sprinkler wires and then wait days or possibly weeks to see how long it takes the homeowner to notice the lawn is dying.
With vandals eliminated, I can only assume the neighborhood tomcat found the bright, dangling things irresistible and batted them around until they fell off and stopped being interesting. Officially, he lives next door. In reality, he lives on my front porch and in my back garden. He just eats next door.
To reconnect the sprinkler wires, I needed to know which of the three coming from the controller was the common wire and which were the field wires. The common is usually white while the field wires are all colors of the rainbow so you can easily identify red as zone 1, blue as zone 2, etc.
Note the colors of the three wires coming out of the tubing. THAAAAAAT’S right…they are all WHITE.
There are multicolored wires coming out of the controller in the back yard but they connect to the backyard valves…located just a few feet from the controller…where you can pull on a wire and see which zone terminal it connects to so the colors are not entirely necessary.
The genius who set things up decided not to bother spending 25 cents to get a second set of colored wires to connect the front sprinklers. You know, the ones half way around the house and stapled to the eaves so, even if you had a second person standing in back to help you see the connections, pulling on a wire from the front would result in zero movement to the wires in the back. You are stuck with trial and error: hook it all up, walk to the back of the house, turn on zone 4, walk to the front of the house, see if it actually turns on, lather, rinse, repeat.
The gods were smiling on me, however. I connected everything correctly on the first try: common, zone 4, and zone 5. I did not even get the zones out of order.
Never underestimate sheer dumb luck.
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