12 SEPTEMBER 2026 WorldWide Drilling Resource® Say It. Don’t Spray It. by Britt Storkson Owner, P2FlowLLC During my growing up years, I recall the phrase “Say it. Don’t spray it.” as an admonition to young children not to talk while their mouths are full. One might understand parts of the statement, but one won’t get all of the information. I had what could be viewed as a similar experience recently with a sprinkler timer. I won’t mention the brand of timer, but it is a good standard product and basically no different than any other conventional sprinkler timer on the market, and we’ve been using it for several years. I had set this timer up to run four valves on one station to service our garden drip system. Since the ½-inch drip tubing could not carry the entire water flow without considerable pressure loss, I arranged the piping so the water source would feed the drip tubing from several different locations off of a much larger (3-inch) PVC pipe minimizing flow losses. I’ve installed and used many sprinkler timers over the years and most of them will allow you to run up to four electric solenoid (sprinkler) valves per station. Since each electric valve solenoid requires 200-250 milliamps (¼-amp) at 24 volts AC (alternating current) meaning the sprinkler timer transformer, switching components, etc. must be able to deliver about 1 amp continuously. I didn’t notice any spec about the number of valves in the instructions for this timer, so I assumed this industry standard would apply here. After considerable wasted time, I finally figured out the timer would not support four valves. That part wasn’t a problem. The problem was how this timer handled a current (amperage) overload. Most timers, when overloaded like this, will immediately shut off everything and put a statement saying “overload” or something like that on the display so you know to check the valve output current load. Or a fuse will blow and you immediately know something is overloaded. That’s not how this timer did things. When it shut down, it put the phrase “NO AC” on the display. Since this timer has a small battery to maintain the display and clock functions, I figured the 120-volt AC line had something wrong with it. This unit had an extension cord because the original cord couldn’t reach to the AC receptacle. So I disassembled the cord ends to check for a problem. No problem found. I replaced the cord with another one. It didn’t change anything either. I did notice when I restored the AC power to it (plugged it in), the timer would run for a few minutes, cycle on and off three or four times, then quit with the “NO AC” indicator on the display. Please note, this did not happen immediately. It took several minutes to perform the shutdown. So when I restored the AC power, turned on the sprinklers, and immediately left, meant I didn’t see this happening - resulting in several false starts, to use a football term. When I did finally stay around after I started the sprinklers, then and only then, did I notice this strange routine. Now that I understood what the problem was, the fix was easy. I used a 24-volt AC relay coil, which is a much smaller current load than the valve, and switched the valve from a separate 24-volt AC power source. A mechanical relay, by the way, is an electrically controlled switch. One routes the output of the sprinkler timer station/zone to the relay coil and, when energized, the magnetic coil pulls in the relay contacts and routes the extra current to the valve solenoid I took off to lighten the load. Using the relay, the loads are effectively isolated, meaning there is no direct electrical connection between the sprinkler timer and the fourth valve. When the sprinkler station turns on it, turns on the extra valve and all works well. This should not have been so difficult to troubleshoot. None of this was mentioned in the timer instructions, so I had no idea what to do to make it work right. It was just the process of elimination which, of course, wasted a lot of time. My message to the manufacturers of these products is a message I’ve preached for some time. Make the product simple, reliable, and easy to troubleshoot. One can’t go too far wrong with that approach. Britt Britt Storkson may be contacted via e-mail to michele@ worldwidedrillingresource.com
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