Reticulation Canning Vale

A leak-detection crew handed this one over: big water consumption, a controller that faulted whenever the solenoids were activated, and eight stations running 30 minutes each, six days a week. On site, the display kept dropping out with a pump error, and the resistance readings told the story — swinging between 29 and 6 ohms. A coil was earthing out.

The culprit was the master valve, and finding it was the real work: six separate common wires in the terminal and valves scattered with no pattern. We located it, replaced it, rejoined the wiring and watched the readings steady — every station responding. We repaired pop-ups on two stations, then opened the master valve manually and watched the water meter for movement: none, so the mainline was sound. Last of all, the programming — wound back from the 30-minutes-a-station, six-days-a-week schedule that had been quietly draining the meter.

The brief at a multi-tenancy industrial estate was simple: inspect and report. We walked all fifteen stations across the three tenancies — internal gardens, lunch-area lawns, muster points and verge after verge of gear drives — and logged every fault: blocked nozzles, faulty and sunken gear drives, sprays that should have been MP rotators, and a controller running seventeen different start times across four programs.

The report went back with everything itemised, and stage-one rectification followed on a purchase order: faulty gear drives replaced, blocked nozzles cleared, sprays swapped over to rotators, and sunken heads raised across the verges and internal grounds. Audit, report, staged works — the way commercial retic should run.

Nothing worked at a unit complex — no stations, nothing. The first visit found solenoid wiring in a sorry state: joins that had never been stripped, others wrapped in tape and rusted through. We remade every connection and still had nothing, then traced the run and found it crossed under the carpark — a damaged wire somewhere below the concrete.

Rather than cut concrete, we snaked new cable through the existing sleeve under the roadway and ran the rest in conduit along the external wall, adding an add-a-station unit to work in with the wiring that had to stay. With that solved and approval given, we kept going: a new master valve, a replacement solenoid valve, corrected wiring, a battery-powered Hunter Node with isolation valve for one unit, repaired micro sprays — and both controllers programmed so each unit waters on its correct days.

"No retic working at all" is how this one came in. The master solenoid and isolation valve had failed, so those went first — then we worked through the system station by station in the hours booked: faulty coils on two stations, a dead solenoid on another, half a dozen broken sprinklers and a missing nozzle replaced along the way.

Seven stations were verified running before we left, with a straight written list of what remained: a couple more sprinklers on one station, and two stations still to be located on a future visit. What was fixed, what's left — in writing, not in vague promises.