I recently moved into a new home & the previous owners didn't particularly maintain it. Among the things that are in disrepair, only a fraction of the irrigation system works. The popup sprinklers in the front yard are correctly tied to the controller, but the front yard drip & back yard popup + drip sprinklers don't come on when all sprinklers are enabled from the controller.
I suspected that the sprinklers weren't properly wired to the controller because there was only one zone connected to the controller. I was able to verify this was the case for the front yard drip sprinklers because it has a manual twist knob override & the sprinklers came on when it was opened:
The left one enabled the front drip sprinklers, and the right enabled the front popup sprinklers.
In the backyard however, there is no twist knob override to manually engage the sprinklers:
I would like to manually turn them on to verify if they still work (they likely haven't been used in over 10 years) before going through the trouble of wiring them to the controller. How else can I verify that the backyard sprinklers still work?
Best Answer
To manually open these valves, gently twist the black cylinder with the wires counter-clockwise. To close them twist them back clockwise. I have the same valves and had to look it up myself.