The Sprinkler Mystery: Newsletter Challenge (August 2014)

Somebody forgot to change them to daylight saving time.

A new sprinkler system is scheduled to start at 9pm, suggesting that it was installed that day? Therefore assuming that the controller has an internal light that goes on and off, when the door is opened and closed, suggests that the wiring is incorrect, and the sprinkler control valve supply, is running through the light switch circuit?

Regards JD.

The sprinkler timer has more than 1 zone, and is timed to run for 15 min in each zone....When the tech turns the sprinklers on manually, the timer was just getting ready to cycle to the next zone....He didn't set the switch to manual, but left it on auto, and switched it on by manipulating the switch with his finger....The sprinkler will be off for 5 min and then restart in the next zone....It's possible that the installer inadvertently reversed the on and off attachments, or failed to install the initial start one....

What would a sprinkler tech be doing there on a service call after 9 PM?

Doesn't say he was there that night... he may have been there three days later for all we know.

"...goes upstairs and sees that the sprinklers have stopped working again." Stopped working again? What does that really mean? It is implied that the waterflow has ceased, and it's further implied the waterflow has been interrupted by a control valve (as it has been directed to do by the controller).

Seems similar to PEBKAC computer issue.

I didn't say he was there that night, but only that he would have had to have been there after 9 PM in order for the previous post's events to take place as described.

He lives there.....it's his house...

No he doesn't; he's Amish. Or he does and is leading a sinful life.

Uh Ho....

Ah. All is clear now! It's elementary.

The timer is actually a cuckoo clock.

When it chimes at 9:00 AM the clock is heard upstairs where all the father's young mädchens are sitting on das bench holding der hand painted flower pot sprinklers, awaiting their morning's call.

So, the clock chimes 9 times and he hears the girls giggling as they embark on their watering duties, but something is very different this morning...

Walking upstairs he finds the girls gone, nowhere to be seen. "Was ist los!"

"Ach," Arnold joyfully exclaims, "es regnet!"

So end the mystery.

CyberRain - Conservation Through Malfunction!

1. They were lying.

2. He should've stayed in the boiler room like he was told.

3. Shutting the controller door reset his manual override. BUT! Does shutting a controller door do such a thing? Who knows? Maybe on some controller models, on others maybe not. There are many kinds of controllers and myriad features to choose from. The Tech would know the particular details because he was there (in theory), but we don't, and so we're not really playing Tech here but the game of "guess what's in my pocket."

4. Maybe the 'correct answer' is "He shut off the boiler-room/basement light to which the controller just happened to be wired (good help is hard to find these days) and that shut off the water." Then again, there is no mention either way of the boiler-room/basement having a light or a light switch. Some do, some don't. It's an old house. Implicit light switches, implicit controller resets, implicit zones, implicit time switches that work in certain implicit ways, implicit, implicit, implicit, all hidden in the Challenge Question? Perish the thought!

5. So, in lieu of a legitimate Challenge Question, here is a fitting answer: A wizard did it.

... in the basement . . . he hears from upstairs . . .

???

Where are the sprinklers and what is upstairs from the basement Oh I mean where is the basement upstairs?

Somebody must have turn the house around and thats why it will start 9 am and not pm.

Yes, the wording is a bit ambiguous but probably means "... he hears (originating) from upstairs ..."

One of the most ambiguous sentences I've run across (not here) was this one: "I saw a man on a hill with a telescope." This sentence has at least six different meanings. Can you find them all?

1. How can one saw with a telescope?

2. the man had the telescope

3. the observer had the telescope

4. the hill had a telescope

Missing the other two! Lets say I cant see because I have no telescope!

I'll see your four and raise you three,

1. The observer was on the hill when he saw the man with the telescope.

2. The observer was on the hill looking through the telescope and he saw a man.

3. The observer was on the hill with the telescope ( must be in OZ, elsewhere they are on mountains ) when he saw the man.

1 (Typo) I Saw, (was his name)

It was a typo, duh!

It should read... "An odd home's new sprinklers..."

It certainly is. I mean, have YOU ever heard of a home needing sprinklers? I've always thought sprinklers were something used on lawns.

"What's going on?"

There is a fault.

The words 'old home' and 'basement boiler room' makes me think this is a house with two separate electric meters, one for the hot water system and a second one for the rest of the house. The new sprinkler system was inadvertently wired into the power for the hot water heater, and at 9 PM that electric meter shut off (to conserve power), killing the power to the water heater and thus also the sprinkler timer, shutting off the sprinklers.

[The following morning at 5 AM (or thereabouts) the electric meter for the hot water tank will come back on and maybe so will the sprinklers.]

Because by the time he got to the top of the steps the clock reached 9 PM.

More: The pipe to the main sprinkler valve would have had a water pressure on the mains side. When the timer hit 9 PM the valve opened, pressurizing the water in the sprinkler lines and causing the sprinkler heads to activate. By 9:01 the power to the timer had shut off thus closing the valve, but it took a few moments for the pressure in the lines running to the sprinkler heads to dissipate.

"Stopped working again" implies an intermittent fault.

"Hearing" would not be a reliable indication of "working fine", so the sound may be something other than water flow, or water flow diverted from the sprinkler system.

Somewhere, in the woods behind the house, The children of a neighbor, who is a pipe fitter, have diverted the waterline and connected it what is now the worlds largest water balloon.

"Hearing" would not be a reliable indication of "working fine"

Another 'fuzzy' element to this CQ: I interpreted the info in the question to mean a person upstairs, seeing the sprinklers in action, shouted down to him that they are working fine (someone had to call him on the phone, tell him they weren't working as expected). You may correct... dunno.

Yep, that person upstairs may be the same one that put the sod in upside down. Therefore, the sprinkler heads may be upside down as we...nope, that's not it....they worked at one time or another, or so I gather.

The author didn't say how far upstairs. That could've been Divine Revelation you know. I understand (implicitly so) that the tech was quite devout.

That's quite true... If a Divine Being of one sort or another told me that it was just fine, I would also button up the controller and go upstairs... well, up to the ground level anyway.

If you can't trust your Divine Being, in whom can you trust?

Death and Taxes.

When I was a kid my folk's water heater shut off at night to save power and came back on during the daytime when hot water was needed for showers, laundry, dishes, etc.

There's no point in heating and re-heating water that is just sitting in a tank.

The phrase 'boiler room' implies an old-fashioned, poorly-insulated water heating system.

Easy. This happened to me. I was troubleshooting an equalizer which had no output signal. It was installed in a store room where the comm line entered the building. I went in, turned on the light and everything seemed to be OK. The output cable went through a hole in the wall.

I left, shut the light off, and went to measure the signal on the other side. No signal. I did this twice before I realized that the installer had wired the power to the light circuit (controlled by the switch). Apparently the light had normally been left on and nobody had noticed before.

The sprinkler controller was obviously wired to the light circuit.

What light circuit?

Oh! You mean the one hidden inside the Challenge Question?

Nah. The tech couldn't find it either, so he used his implicit flashlight, which he propped up on the gravity-fed, fuel-oil-powered boiler like the one I had in Maine where the electricity failed a lot during winter storms so they put in one that didn't depend on electricity.

No worries. As this is far less a legitimate Challenge Question than it is a game of "guess what's in my pocket?" all solutions proposed thus far are equally legitimate in every way and so my money's riding on my personal favorite: the water-ballon theory.

I'm going to throw you a GA because you made me laugh out loud. Well done.

Yeah, I figured "Old home" was the clue that the wall sockets were probably switched. It reminded me of my experience. These puzzles are usually "totally off the wall" obscure, so I figured, "Why not".

Everyone except the Chef, at work in the kitchen, failed to notice the light bulbs filling water. When the bulb over the stove broke, the Chef exclaimed "This house sure gone crazy"!

Plain ol' Bad Luck: clearly the home's nuclear reactor shut down just as his foot hit the stop step. It's what happens when you buy your cheap-arse fuel rods on eBay.

Ok, the hose barb on the valve has shaved a small "flap" of plastic on the tubing I.D, that is acting as a delayed flow-check valve.

?

Ok, the sprinkler heads are light activated and only come on when a skirt or kilt is detected.

It may be zat Nancy being colorblind, mistook ze blue ribbons for ze yellow and was following the ze instructions of ze American song "Tie a yellow ribbon".

The little gray cells, they work hard, no?

'Tain't 9pm!

When he thinks he hears the sprinklers working, he is actually hearing the noise of a leak in the old water pipes, and it is clearly audible from the basement. Perhaps the new system is not even hooked up to the pipes controlled by the controller. Maybe he can't hear the leak from upstairs because it is buried underground, or maybe he does hear it. The problem says that he "sees" that the the sprinklers have stopped working.
They haven't actually stopped. They never started.

Since it is a new installation, the thing has never been used before (this is important), the 24 hour time clock has been set to 0900 hours, which has not yet come around. When the thing was manually turned on, the water was heard running in the pipes. By tje time he went upstairs, the water had reached the outside piping and froze in them. Middle of winter here......happens often

An old home. Maybe someone forgot to pay the water bill and a tech came by to turn their supply off. Or how about the young son of the householder turning the main supply pipe off for a lark. How long after 9PM did the tech manually turn it on. How long did it take him to see they were off after hearing that they were working. Or, as suggested in a reply already, they took the control boards power from a timed circuit. Come to think of it I doubt that a tech from the water company would be working at 9 PM. Maybe the power supply to the house failed. Possibly the extra current needed to run the sprinkler system blew the old fuse in the power supply. I know from experience this can happen. As for the what is in my pocket game. Two coins and a dirty hanky. I just checked.

Interlock on controller door wired in reverse, so only works when door open.

No interlocks in my sprinkler controller. None at all! You must be referring to the interlock hidden in the Challenge Question.

When you hide stuff in Challenge Questions you can hide *anything* you want in there and then magically produce it at the last minute with a wave of the hands and "Presto! The Correct Answer!" but, like counterfeit money, you do so at the risk of their becoming 'challenge questions' in name only...

"What has it got in its pocketses? We guess! WE GUESS!!"

-Gollum/Smeagol, 'The Hobbit'

I've had this happen. The tech set the system to run for a minute or less to test each zone. By the time he moved from the boiler room, to the house, the sprinkler system had timed out and reset.

The controller ac adaptor was plugged into or taken from switched ac supply. Like it may be sharing the switched power for the light in the boiler room... Since it was a newly installed controller, the backup battery for the memory / clock is still fresh and therefor functional even when the light was turned off inside the boiler room..

Or the controller programming was left in the manual mode only?

Power for the new sprinkler controller was drawn off the boiler room lighting circuit. Old home poorly marked wires it was connected it to the switched leg for the lights. While in the boiler room you needed the lights to see especially at 9 PM.

Somebody used water fro some other purpose:toilet, wash, sink etc.

I assume this is a home fire protection system. So, why is there even a time clock in the system as some have suggested. Fire protection sprinklers should be on 100% of the time--fire does not pick a given time to start!

Also, if he could tell by water flow that they were working fine, then was a sprinkler head not installed and/or was it flowing all over the floor?

Also see #53.

He hears and then sees.

So it is a simple matter of hearsay evidence. There was no proof of them working.

Or because it is an Old House that is implicitly haunted the problem is heresy.

'Course it could be lawn sprinklers, but why didn't he say so?

Because fire sprinklers are not scheduled to come on at 9:00?

The real mystery is why there are so many interpretations of a clearly stated problem. There are a lot of possible answers including:

1. The person upstairs was lying (they never were working)

2. There is a door switch on the controller box that turned the sprinklers off when the tech closed the door (wiring error)

3. The timer was set to another time, and the tech switched it back to automatic before he closed the door

4. A breaker blew while the tech was climbing the stairs

5. The timer was set to a short time that ran out before the tech got upstairs

6. The city shut off the water because the bill was not paid

1. "heard" not "seen" to be working - therefore not verified.

Nothing happened. The installation is incomplete until it's working properly.

The sprinkler company obviously has installers that don't know what they are doing.

I suspect that the company may have installed the system, but no one programmed the controller.

Bill

Want fun? Try programming one with no literature... There are instructions on the box, but 20 years of weather has made them very hard to read.

He is one of 150,000 people in Detroit who haven't paid their water bill.

And one of 3,000 with stolen sprinkler systems that don't work (and at 9 PM that ain't no 'sprinkler tech' there making a 'service call')

Around here I become a sanitary engineer when the garbage needs to be taken out

Perhaps this is a home install job. Daytime job auto tech (mechanic) - so at night he is endorsed as a "sprinkler tech".

Power to the solenoids/controller came from one of these. When the lights went out so did the capacity to turn on the solenoids. The controller program had an inbuilt battery.

I'm guessing that when the tech came back down to the basement; the light came on! ( groan. O.K. I admit I only answered this post to make that bad joke. )

Hey, Patrick are my indicators (turn signals?) working?Yes

No
Yes
No
etc

Del

Most down here simply run out of blinker fluid.

The sprinklers have no water because the thing that controls the water flow isn't energised or there is no water pressure upstream of that device. A simple logical fault finding investigation will ascertain why.

Is there water?

Is there power?

Is the solenoid valve open?
Does the controller indicate it is open?

Are the electrons in the wiring the proper blue ones?

Del

Actually, I think there is another cause for the problem...

Some systems down here use rain sensors as well as a timer. If it is raining, the sprinklers won't go on.

If one is stupid enough to locate that sensor where the system would spray it, well, off goes the system as soon as it starts.

I kind of hinted at that possibility a few posts back, but no one took the hint and ran with it.

Yes that's symptomatic of an ill defined problem.
I think the Aliens did it 'cos they were tired of building pyramids.

Mind my fault finding regime would show that the control system had switched it off and presumably the hypothetical rain indicator indicator led would show the hypothetical rain sensor was wet. Or the Alien presence circuit would have triggered. Maybe the paranormal sensor is out of calibration and the cold draught when the door closes trips that?

Where's Scooby when you need him?

Del

"I kind of hinted at that possibility a few posts back, but no one took the hint and ran with it."

Thing is, CR4 has an international audience, some (and possibly many) of whom would not have any experience with sprinkler controllers. Great question for those who do but, were we to take a poll of CR4's forty or fifty thousand members, how many would own or have had any experience with them? A tiny minority, at most?

Seems to me a engineering Challenge Question should appeal to a broad engineering audience. This CQ does not; it appeals to those having familiarity with a certain kind of product, not necessarily to those having backgrounds in the sciences, technology and mathematics. This is an engineering forum, not a product forum.

I do not have any experience with sprinkler controllers

I am Spartacus!

Del

(Mind ignorance has never stopped me responding in the past)

"(Mind ignorance has never stopped me responding in the past )"

Nah, me neither. As proof, I offer you this thread.

"I am Spartacus!"

Wait. Shouldn't that be Sparticat: Destroyer of Worlds?

No Sprinklers? Not even a tinkle here and there? Must be catatonic.

Sure you are not Gunga Din?

I do not have any experience with sprinkler controllers

I am not Spartacus!

JDG

(Mind, ignorance has never stopped me plagiarizing in the past )

__________________

So that's why you're undercover. The Truth at last. (btw, if you do it often enough, it's called 'research')

My experience has been with those battery powered controllers that you hook up to your outside faucets, that I only use when I reseed the lawn every couple of years. The method of setting the time and duration on some of these is rather obscure, and having forgotten how it works from the last time I used it, I usually have to do a search on the internet to figure it out again.

OK let me throw out this idea, having owned an "old" house (Ca 1900 in the US)

Assumptions:

1. The electrical system was not grounded (knob &tube wiring)
2. The basement had a dirt floor that was always damp
3. The modern solid state controller required a ground which was connected to the panel in order to function, but the panel was never bonded to an actual earth ground

The technician while working on the control panel provided a path to ground allowing the controller to function. As soon as he closed the panel and broke his contact with it, the controller stopped functioning.

Wasn't that the last "Caption This"?

Same Tech/Different Day

Well, at least we know he lived. Is this a Good Thing?

Just curious cobber, was that answer "Mathematical", "Technical". or just something else..... ;-)

Hmmm...you're in Haverhill, Taxachusetts? c 1900 is 'old?' Heck, that ain't old. There's a house in Newbury c 1600s. You can find it near the corner where you turn toward the causeway out to Plum Island. 1648 or something.

psst: they don't have a sprinkler system either.

Old, but the electrical system was not installed until the early 1900s at least

My controller has a double insulated case.

When the controller is opened up, automatic operation is disabled.

Manual operation works fine.

When the controller is closed, automatic operation resumes.

Of course, this doesn't explain why automatic operation isn't working.

Methinks that scheme would make adjusting/tuning the system a little awkward.

I'm surprised it isn't used as industry standard.

Oh but it is. Clearly you've never owned a Chevy Cavalier.

What a studid Mystery Challenge! And sooo many QAs given out for such a stupid one! Personally, I think the "I saw a man on a hill with a telescope" was a better riddle than the Mystery Challenge. Okay, maybe I'll chng my mind later when the real answer is unfolded (if there really is such an answer.)

Sorry, meant GAs, not QAs. (I work with entirely too many QA folks & it's showing)

I don't know about those GAs, but I think the Challenge Question itself should be marked Off-Topic.

it was programed for 9AM... exhale... How many engineers does it take to beat a horse to death?

About 50, I guess--the horse ain't dead yet.

Silly! Engineers don't beat horses to death, they talk them to death.

No, it's the peer review that drives them over the cliff.

The first words of the puzzle say it is scheduled to start at 9PM.

To me that meant it was programmed to do that as the words can be interpretted as synonyms.

The challenge gives the impression that it has been working and has mnow failed. It is unclear and badly worded.

Del

If it said it was programed to start at 9PM would agree, but "scheduled to start at 9PM" is loose wording at best. It also states that it's a new sprinkler system which gives no indication that it has ever worked properly. The fact that it's and old home shouldn't matter. The switched electrical outlet problem ..if that is the case.. is still viewed by me (former electrical contractor) as an install error. Why? Because it's not the old homeowners the installer didn't locate a dedicated power supply to use. When these problems are worked out the installation will then be complete.

Not enough information but that's typical of a lot of good, fun problems (unless you're in the military ).

The controller has been set to turn on the sprinklers for five seconds maybe (instead of five minutes?). At 9pm, the valve opens, fills the pipe but just before the water comes out of the sprinkler nozzles, the valve closes and no water comes out. Tech goes down, doesn't check the timer setting, triggers the sprinkler and is informed that they're working, closes the box and goes upstairs only to find that the water has stopped again.

I don't know if this is correct but I know some technicians who went through a similar problem. (",)

regards,

vulcan