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Rain sensor

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Gangee:
Jim,

Just hooked up my rain sensor. How do I know of it's working?

Jim:
Hi Gangee,

The best way would be to test it.  To test the rain sensor you'd want to get the sensor wet.  Put a few drops of water on the sensor element, or immerse the sensor in water, either way.   Then go to the controller and look to see that the yellow LED has illuminated.  If the yellow LED is illuminated then the sensor is working.  This LED will continue to be lit whenever the sensor detects water.  The felt pad absorbs water and keeps the "rain" sensor on for a time period after precipitation has moved away.    When the felt pad has dried out the yellow LED will turn off.

Note:  The irrigation does not cutoff immediately when the yellow LED is lit.  There is a five minute delay to eliminate false triggers.  Also, if a cycle has started before the rain trigger is received,  the cycle will only be stopped after the currently operating zone has run to completion.

Hope this explains the operation of the rain sensor.  By the way you can use any "normally open" rain sensor (including wireless) with EtherRain and the process works the same way.

Hope this explains, thanks for posting.

JIm

  

Gangee:
Hey Jim,

Yep, it's working.  I poured some water on it then checked the yellow light.  It's on. 
Nice.

Gangee:
Jim,

My yellow light is still on from my test this morning.  That makes sense, I poured quite a bit of water on the sensor. 

But on the Statistics tab, "Rain currently detected" is No.  Also, "Date/Time of last check-in" is set to over an hour ago and is showing "Late".

I checked my connection log, it looks like the device is sending packets.

What's up?

Gangee:
Jim,

I see by my connection log that there was an "outage", so maybe that's why the rain sensor wasn't being updated.

I looked at the forum entries on the connection log.  Hmm.  I don't get it, because during that time I was on the Internet.  Nothing was being downloaded or anything like that to hog up bandwidth.  I could connect to the device fine, but that's not using the Internet.  I see I'm getting a log once a day with significant outages.  Really strange because during a couple of those times no one was here.

Any trouble shooting you can offer would be great.

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