Why is my lawn looking yellow?
Why is my lawn looking yellow? That is the question I recently had to ask myself. For many years my lawn has taken the heat of summer without looking this bad. I did the normal things for lawn maintenance. A thorough lawn aeration in early spring to increase the water absorption. I dropped some fertilizer on it in early spring and increased the cutting height at the start of summer. But nothing is working this time. Every time I looked at the lawn the dirt did not look damp or wet on watering days. My lawn is clearly stressed. I assumed that it must be a lack of water and the 100 degree temperature days.
Related Article: Lawn Aeration and You
Related Article: Summer Lawn Height and Good Mowing Practices
Caution, Going off topic
Let me drag my rant box out for a quick second. My town has decided that we are using to much water and that we need to cut back. So instead of watering our yards three days a week, we can only water for two days. That might be ok for trees and bushes but collectively the lawns in our town are really looking bad. They look as bad as mine. Ok ok, I’m putting the box away.
It must be electrical
Ok, so I have all the maintenance items for the lawn done so what is left to do? I checked my programs(3) in the sprinkler controller and yes it was set to go on during the right day of the week and for the duration, I had set. So what is the problem? It has to be something electrical. It could be the sprinkler timer/controller, the wiring, the transformer, a solenoid, or a valve. All these parts need to be checked, so what do I check first?
I needed some help in choosing the order to check things. I don’t want to check parts in a random order and get confused as to what has been checked and whether an unchecked thing upstream of the part I’m checking is impacting the test results. This could result in me buying unneeded parts and wasting my money.
So I found the following video. It helps you develop the order in which things are checked so that you know that everything is working correctly upstream of the part you are checking. Also, I like that when you are checking a particular component that he mentions what you should expect the values to be if they are within an acceptable range.
Tools Needed
The Order
- Voltage to the controller(this checks that the transformer is providing the right voltage from the wall plug to the controller)
- Testing station output(this checks that each station of the controller is working properly). I pulled the wires on my controller(took a closeup picture with my cell phone first before disconnecting any wires) so that I would not be watering anything on a wrong day.
- Testing continuity(this test checks your wires from the controller to the valves and the solenoids at the valves at the same time as long as the solenoids remain connected).
- Testing the solenoid(he has you check this separately). But if you leave your solenoids connected for the continuity test you are checking both the wires and solenoid resistance at the same time. If any of the circuits give you a bad reading during the continuity test, test that circuit’s wiring and solenoids separately.
So I checked all of the above and the equipment turned out to be in good condition. What else could it be? If all the equipment is working properly and you have accomplished all lawn maintenance tasks then the only thing left it could be is the programming. I had checked my programming everything was as it should be. So the only thing left was to chase the Gremlins out of the system.
It must be a Gremlin?
You never know when a Gremlin will appear so I erased the programming. I changed the program that the lawn sprinklers were on(from program A to program C) to another program. Then I reprogrammed it. This time I increased the time for watering the lawn by 50% to compensate for one less day of watering. My next watering day the lawn area was clearly watered. Gremlins zero, homeowner one.
So what did I learn from this problem? I learned the proper order for checking the electrical sprinkler equipment. I learned that even if the programming looks good to erase it and start fresh just in case something in the controller memory(a Gremlin) has fouled up the system.
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