all right guys back with another non-car related diy video today sorry about that i'm in the middle
of moving and fixing a lot of things anyways my hunter x-core sprinkler controller has been acting
up on me for the last couple years i've been just neglecting to fix it all i've been doing
is manually activating my sprinklers turning the valves manually right there and letting them run
for a couple minutes but now since i'm selling the house i gotta actually fix this thing so
it looks like the lcd there's something wrong with it so what i'm going to do today is i'm
going to take this whole thing off the wall bring it inside put it on a table and then
take apart the board to see what's the issue it seems like there's either something wrong with
the contacts on the lcd or something wrong with the board so we'll go investigate what's wrong
today all right so in order to take this thing apart what we're going to do is pop this lower
panel off once you take that off just put that off to the side and there's actually
some mounting screws down here that you want to take apart you can't take this thing out without
removing the whole box off the wall because the access screws are behind the panel here
so yeah you got to take this whole box off so we're going to do is just remove
these two screws at the bottom here luckily the top screws are just a slide in holes
unplug this thing right out what you want to do is unplug the wires
and just keep note of which wires you took off and on mine's pretty easy because it's only got
the two channels the front and the rear house and the power wire and the sensor wire over here
for the rain sensor so i'll just go ahead and unscrew all these and take these out right now
there we have it we'll go to the bench now so we're inside on the bench now so what we're going
to do is take apart these four screws that hold the panel off so they're pretty deep screws so you
can't use an electric screwdriver on here you just got to get a regular screw and just unscrew it
you want to take the power transformer screws off before i test the
transformer and everything and the transformer actually was working fine i was getting power
24 volt ac to them and i also jumped these straight to the solenoids and they activated
the solenoid so the transformer wasn't the issue in my case so now we got the board apart and we'll
take a closer look now here's the inside of the board and the first thing you'll notice as the
capacitors have some kind of film or some kind of fluid that's been flowing out of them that's also
dried up and on the board i've seen this online on some photos and videos of other people's boards
i'm not sure if it's just some kind of protective coating that was on here that ended up melting
because it's in an outdoor environment but we'll see if those are causing any kind of issues here
as far as passer leaking getting messed up on the board but what i want to do is unscrew
all these screws and kind of pop this panel off and see what the lcd is doing on the other side
since the screws are all penetrating right through the board i have to take
apart each one of these screws right here and the blank plates
so i got all the screws out put these off to the side a little bit
and i gotta punch out these four blank plates that they have in here
so as we can see on this side pretty much the capacitors all have the same affliction as the
back side so they've got some kind of film where there's a protective film before or something that
leaked out of them it's all over and dried up on here so i'm going to check all the contacts on
them to make sure they're good i might also check the lcd this thing actually just sits on here by
peels off and it just makes contact with the with the backboard here pretty simple like you're just
a compression fit on maybe that's loose and that's causing the lcds to have problems and maybe i also
want to check make sure the dial is making contact and these buttons are making contact
clean up some of these contacts right here there's like some solder or
some bare non-aluminum or non-copper
i don't know that's affecting the lcd any i just scrape it up just to give it better contact
some of these capacitors look like they're corroded as far as the
solder joints go so maybe those are causing some issues too
you pop off the dial by popping these two plastic trims in the back here the four corners just
taking it up when you take the dial off you'll notice this piece right here
and then also there's another piece right here that makes the contact as you turn it
and make sure all that stuff's in place contacts look pretty good here they've
got a nice grease foam on them just want to put it all back together and
but overall nothing i can see other than capacitors so i'm gonna just do all this testing
and plug it back up and see if i get anything to register or work so what i noticed here is
that little white piece that fell out right there it actually broke off of the dial in the middle
so i don't know if that's affecting the contact for some reason i'm gonna either go try jb weld
that or super glue that back on to see if that holds and maybe that affects some of the contacts
i'll let that dry for a little bit see what happens so next thing i'm going to
do is take this lcd just make sure all the contacts are nice and clean on it
not sure which side was the top and bottom anymore but
we'll go ahead and put it back in and see what happens i'm going to put it back in here that i
think that this is really the alignment for it right here just putting inside this box
all right i think the dial should be dry by now so i'm going to pop this back in
it only goes in one way because the way these things pop in and then the nubs
now plug it in and i'll put this in and hopefully i'll play some power to it it might work
plug this in and see if this thing does anything as far as the lcds go
so i've got the power transformer plugged up i'm just going to give it some power now to the actual
unit and see what it does so lcd is still acting up so what we're going to do now i heated up my
soldering iron i'm gonna clean up some of these solder welds around the
capacitors to see if that's the issue i'm gonna clean up this little trace right
here for the led that has a little bit of solder on it for some reason
and just see how it goes this thing looks like it had a little bit of water intrusion over the years
that's kind of corroded or oxidized some of these solder joints so i'm going to just go
ahead and any of the suspect ones i'm going to go ahead and just hit them with a little
bit of solder heat see if i could loosen up the flux a little bit just to see if it works better
some of these joints on the actual samsung chip
they're kind of off too so i'm just going to go ahead and
see if i can just clean up some of them a little bit i might just get the air solder on this
so did everything i could and no luck so this thing is pretty much a failure i'm not gonna
waste any more time on it so i'll just go ahead and just order a replacement and install it and
i'll show you guys how to install that so i ended up getting this orbit basic four zone controller
it was like 41 at home depot to replace that one that's not working pretty much bolted in the same
location i used that same hanging screw up here and i just had to drill two new ones down here
since it's a little bit shorter you can see the old screws down here anyway i just put my
conduit through i'm going to use the same exact wires because that's all you're going to need
you got the white one with common and then two zones i have here so i just set them on one and
two over there i already connected the rain gauge which is right here it just routes through it just
makes it close or open contact then you just gotta make sure you turn the rain sensor on right here
and it should work so i'm gonna plug this baby up and see if it works overall the wiring on this new
orbit one is much easier than the previous one like i said earlier i just plugged in the rain
gauge which doesn't matter which side it is just plug it into two here you got the one common wire
and then two zones and these have these little compression things which is much easier than
the screws on that other one i had and then the power the power actually goes from the transformer
right into the board already so you don't have to deal with the power tuck all your wires away
this thing has a nice easy door just fold it down snaps right in pull the back of battery power and
then just plug this thing into your outlet on your outside and you should be ready to program
testing it out it works perfectly fine so we got it running
we got our two zones so i'm just running the test right now this thing is pretty user
friendly intuitive i mean all you have to do is turn the dial to whatever you want set the time
set the date and it's good to go much easier and more user-friendly than the x-core hopefully
this one lasts it has a six-year warranty if you guys found this video useful or found value in it
please subscribe to your channel i know it's not my usual content but once in a while i
like to do some diy repairs around the house thanks for watching guys
you