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Okay it’s time to wire our system. I’m just showing you the different, the colors of the wires here. I use red, white, and blue as my first three zones. It’s just easier to remember, red, white, and blue, one, two, three. Strip your wires down and give yourself plenty of working room there. I’ve got about 5 inches and then you’ll just use a pair of electrical pliers and strip your wires about a half inch on each wire.
Now the red, white, and blue will be my hot and I’m using my black wire as the common wire. So each valve has two wires coming out it. It does not matter which one you use for common, just grab one of them. The hot wire is not as important when it comes to valves versus say lighting or something.
So I have three values, I’m going to take three of the wires, or one wire from each valve equally three. And I’m going to hook all three of those up to my common. We’re using waterproof connectors. There are several different kinds of waterproof connectors, these are just filled with some sort of water sealant, and they’re regular electrical connectors with a water sealant inside of them. So we’re going to hook, those are commons, three commons hooked up to our black wire.
There are some that you can insert the entire end of the wire into a grease filled cap and close it. These are just a little faster. Now so I’m going to take my first zone, what ever I want to be zone one and I’m going to hook it up to my red wire. So then zone two will be white. Take the remaining wire that is left from that valve and then we’re going to do the same thing with zone three, the blue wire.
Now that we’ve got all of the wires hooked up, you want to pull a little bit of extra slack out of the your main line. The black wire there and so you can put it into the valve box so that later when you get ready to work on it again or change something or change the wiring, you’ll have room to pull it outside of the valve box, just wrap a little bit there. And then lay your wire, your black wire into your ditch, into your trench that you’ve already got dug. Run it over to where you want it to enter the house. And then we just use an electric or a hammer drill to drill through the wall where we need to drill through. And we take the wire through the wall. And then we’ve got out control box inside the garage in this particular instance.
So we pull our wire through and now we’re ready to wire up our control box. Once again, we just strip the ends of the wire. And pull the black rubber covering. Now we’re going to use the same red, white, and blue wires. So any excess wires that you have in this case the green and the yellow, we’re going to cut those off just to get those out of the way. It makes for less confusion. So we’re going to strip about half inch, you could strip maybe a quarter of an inch when you’re hooking up to the control box depending on what control box you use. And in each control box usually they’re very user friendly. One of them will say common or COM. And so you’re going to hook your common up to that area, which is our black wire. And then they’ll just generally be a one, two, and three for your different zones. So in our particular case we’ve got red, white, and blue for zone one, two, and three.
He’s having a little trouble with his common there. You don’t want to cut too much of the plastic covering off in this particular case because if you do your wires can touch inside of the manifold. So we’re just using about, about a quarter of an inch. Sometimes you’ll have to cut the wires at different lengths just to get it to fit in the valve box the way you want it.
Okay now we’ve got those connected one, two, and three and this particular controller is using an AC outlet so we’re going to hook our AC power up, which it’s pretty straig...