The Complete Guide on Monitoring and Parental Control on a Chromebook and Disabling Incognito Mode - Part 2

[This is a 5-part series. Here are links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.]

Problem Statement:

Know what web sites my daughter wastes time on when she is at home with a school managed Google Suite account (because her school has monitoring of their own) without me spending too much time or spend any money on new hardware devices.

Option 1: Control at the router and network level

1.2 Parental Control on the Router

Another place to implement parental control is right on your router, whether it is a modem/router combo device or a separate WiFi router you connect to the ISP modem.

Most routers sold today offer some kind of parental control. Even my five-year-old Motorola model/router has it. However, with so many variety of makes and models of routers out there, the level of parental control you get is a total YMMV (Your Mile May Vary). Generally you login to the admin console of the router (normally just type 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1 into your browser address bar), and create your custom rules there.

So what kind of parental control might be available on a router?

Control Internet Access at the Device Level

Pretty much all routers will allow you to disable Internet access based on device MAC address (a unique id for any network device) because that is an essential function of a router. Most routers will also allow you to create device level schedules that determines when a device can get online (even my 5-year old Motorola router has that).

Filter and Block Contents at the Device Level

Again, most routers today will allow you to block websites at a device level, and possibly with a schedule so certain websites can only be visited during allowed time (my 5-year old Motorola router does that). This helps, for example, if you don't want your kids watching YouTube all night. However, the duty is on you to identify all the websites you want to block or control, and if your kids are smart enough to find other video web sites (such as dailymotion or disneynow) that you are not aware of, you are in trouble (once you find out, of course, they are now in trouble 😉).

Some router might offer list of websites or even categories you can select from. But these are rare.

Control How Much Time a Device Can Stay Online

This is a more flexible and advanced control, because now you don't have to specify fixed schedules on when your kids can get online. They have X amount of time to have Internet access for that day, and they can choose to use it anytime they want. However, this is an overall Internet access control, not control based on which website they visit. So you can't say, for example, 15 minutes on Instagram each day.

Some routers offer this capability right on the router, such as this cheap TP-Link AC1750 WiFi Router for $57.99.

TP-Link AC1750 Dual Band Gigbit WiFi Router 

Keep Track of What Websites Your Kids Are Visiting

Knowing what websites my kids are visiting is the most beneficial feature for me for my daughter's case. Some routers offer to keep a history of all websites visited (can be filtered by device), such as some NetGear routers as described in this How-To article.

Most NetGear router you can buy today seems to offload the website visit history function to the Circle App on your smart phone (you just have to go through the hassle to download the app and configure it), such as this NETGEAR Nighthawk AC1750 WiFi Router for $88.

NEGEAR Nighthawk AC1750 Gigbit WiFi Router

Since I don't intend to buy any new devices and spend more time reconfiguring my entire home network, this is not a solution for me.

You might ask, what is this Circle App thing? That naturally leads to the next possible solution, an additional monitoring/control device on your home network.

1.3 Circle with Disney

So what is Circle with Disney?

Circle with Disney is a physical box that wirelessly connects to your home network to monitor, control and report on internet activity.

I can't figure out why this device has Disney's name associated with it. It is made by a company in Oregon. Customers do feel a bit safer when they see Disney's name.

This is an add-on device to your network that allows you to manage the following through the MyCircle app on your smart phone:

Basic features:

• Online content filters per device from existing categories.
• Time online tracking per device and stats (graphs).
• Breakdown of which sites were visited per device throughout the day.

Premium features:

• Limit online time per device.
• Bedtime control (basically scheduling Internet off)
• Pause Internet for a device from your app.
• Location tracking for mobile devices. (This is more for convenience of stats in one place. Your mobile devices can already do this by their own.)
• Rewards of extra online time (Basically the same as you increasing allowed time online.)

Although this is not a solution for me because I don't intend to spend extra money, this does sound like a great solution. The Circle for Disney device sells for $99.99.

Circle for Disney

Before you pull the trigger and buy this device though, be aware that there is a catch:
What you are buying for $99.99 is the device and a one-year subscription which includes all the premium services. After one-year subscription is up, you will have to pay $9.99/month to keep using the premium services. My understanding is that you should still be able to get the basic features for free. And you should be able to obtain the other features from other means most likely for free.

1.4 Google Mesh WiFi

Google Mesh WiFi is a product to improve WiFi signals at your home especially for those spotty areas. It is also a WiFi router so you don't need a separate WiFi router solution. I already have Google Mesh WiFi at my house. A 3-pack (nodes) Google Mesh WiFi sells for $239.

If you already have Google Mesh WiFi or are planning to get them to improve WiFi signals anyway, you should definitely take advantage of the parental control functions that come with it for free.

The control and monitoring happens on a smart phone app you download to manage your Google WiFi. Inside the app there's a function called Family WiFi. There are four main features:

1. You can group devices with labels and then monitoring and control at a group level.
2. You can apply Google's SafeSearch filter on a device or a group of devices to block adult web sites automatically (same SafeSearch in Google search engine).
3. Schedule Internet time-outs. For example, shutdown Internet access to a device or a group of devices at 9:30pm during weekdays and 10:30pm at weekends.
4. Pause/Un-pause Wi-Fi access on demand directly from your own smart phone.

To read more about the Family WiFi features, you can read this Google Help Page.

But there is one feature lacking, website visit history. Google actually sell this as a privacy feature as described in this Google Help Page. We all know that Google is already tracking everything about you, your search history from the search engine, your schedule from your calendars, your hobbies from your emails, places you visit from your smart phone geo data, and your conversations at home from Google Home voice assistants. So please stop pretending and just give us the website monitoring feature for heaven's sake!

I take full advantage of the Google Mesh WiFi's Family WiFi parental control features. But because of the lack of history logs, this is also not a solution to my problem.

By the way, if you do want to get Google Mesh WiFi and also want to use Google Home, make sure to read my other blog post about how to make them work together.

That's it for today's post. Make sure to read:

Part 3 of the Complete Guide

You will get paint on you when you paint, no matter how careful you are.

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

The Complete Guide on Monitoring and Parental Control on a Chromebook and Disabling Incognito Mode - Part 1

[This is a 5-part series. Here are links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.]

My teenage daughter uses a Chromebook for her school work and assignments. Chromebook is a lightweight laptop computer running Chrome OS. Here lightweight is both in terms of the computing power and the actual weight. The biggest benefits of a Chromebook is that: 1. It is very cheap!! (Such as the one below for only $139.91 on Amazon.) 2. It has long battery life (11+ hours). 3. It is very light (Solid State Drive) and also durable (Solid State Drive).

As a responsible parent, I want to make sure that when my teenage daughter uses the laptop, she is not wasting time watching online videos, online window shopping, access inappropriate contents, or wasting time on social media. So in this post I'll share my findings on the many ways of monitoring and parental control on a Chromebook.

Problem Statement:

Know what web sites my daughter wastes time on when she is at home with a school managed Google Suite account (because her school has monitoring of their own) without me spending too much time or spend any money on new hardware devices.

Option 1: Control at the router and network level

1.1 Use DNS Servers

DNS stands for Domain Name Server. The server is responsible for translating easy to memorize domain names (such as lannyland.com) to an IP address (such as 67.222.38.97), so your app or browser can find the actual web server hosting the service. Without a DNS server, your device would have no idea where to go when you put in a web address. All your phones and computers are configured to use a DNS server so they can function correctly. In most cases, the DNS server is managed by your Internet Service Provider or a big tech company that offers free ones (e.g., Google).

Since a DNS server is the translator in between, it can do two things:
1. Log what translation queries it received, and
2. Decide if a translation should be made.

For parents, this means:
1. You can see what web sites and web pages were visited in logs.
2. Use a filter service on the DNS server to deny translation requests for bad web sites by their names (URLs).

If you are an expert in managing computer networks, you can run your own DNS server at home. It has been a long time since I ran full suite of networking services at home, and I don't want to spend the time to set all these up at home. So not a solution for me.

Another option is to use free services like OpenDNS (they have paid services too). You will need to sign up an account with them and then configure your system(s) to use their DNS servers.

Pros:

• Even the free version lets you see stats and logs of domains visited (only for 14 days).
• With the free version you can also block individual domains or user existing filters to block websites by category (e.g., Social Media Sites).

Cons:

• You need to know your router's IPV4 address at your ISP in order to create the network in OpenDNS dashboard. It's actually really easy to find it. Simply type "what is my ip address" in your Google search box while connected to your home network and Google will tell you. Your IPV4 address is most likely a dynamic IP address (vs. a static IP address), which means it can change from time to time (luckily, not very often). OpenVPN's solution is to install a client on your computer that will automatically update OpenVPN when the IP address changes. But you will have to install that on a different computer, because there is no client available for Chromebook. Or, just update the IP address in OpenDNS settings when it changes.
• If you set your router to use OpenDNS's DNS servers, you can't tell who visited the web sites (e.g., both my wife and my daughter visit shopping web sites). So instead, you should set up custom DNS just for the computer you want to monitor. This also means it works best when you only need to monitor one kid.
• This only works if the device you want to monitor connects to your home network.
• Stats are logs are only made available to you once each hour with a big delay (hours). If you don't need to know very quickly what your kids are browsing, this might be a solution for you.
• Stats and logs are actually not very informative:
• There's no timestamp on when a domain is visited and how much time is spent there. 
• The smallest range is a day, so you can't pin point domains visited by hour.
• Logging is also at domain/subdomain level, so there's no info on what web pages were visited.
• All the domains visited by scripts in web pages (such as auto ads, tracking, etc.) are also tracked, creating a long list of entries. For example, during the 6 hours I tracked, my daughter visited 724 unique domains, and during the peak hour, she visited over 500 unique domains (see screen captures below). This makes finding what websites she really visited a very time consuming task.

Example of useless domains tracked. Note the number of entries.

Example graph for unique domains visited during a 6-hour period.

If you think this meet your parental control needs, go to the links below to get more information. But it is clearly not a satisfactory solution for me.

Differences Between the Free and Paid Service Plans
How to Use OpenDNS on Your Router, PC, Tablet, or Smartphone
How to Change the DNS Server on a Chromebook


That's it for today's post. Make sure to read:

Part 2 of the Complete Guide

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: Make Google Mesh WiFi and Google Home (Mini) Work Together

Google Mesh WiFi is a great solution for homes that have bad or spotty WiFi signals. You can get as many nodes as you want and then put them in different parts of your home. They mesh together and provide good quality WiFi coverage throughout your home.

You can also use the Google WiFi app (only available on your smart phones) to manage WiFi connections to all your devices and schedule when they can have WiFi access or filter unsafe, inappropriate contents for your children.

It supports typical router functionalities such as port forwarding, static IP, prioritized streaming, and more. However, it doesn't log what websites your WiFi devices are visiting.

Google Home series of devices (Google Home, Google Home Max, Google Home Mini, Google Hub) are voice assistant devices similar to Amazon Echo series. You can ask them to look up information such as knowledge facts, weather, traffic, news, or control smart home devices with your voice (by the way, Vivint products such as thermostat, locks, lights, etc., are all compatible with Google Home). But most people use them mainly for music and alarm/timer. My kids like to use them to check their homework.

Since I have both Amazon and Google voice assistants, I only have 3 Google Home devices.

Both Google products are useful. But when I got my Google Mesh WiFi and tried to get my Google Home devices connected to my Google Mesh WiFi, it became a disaster.

Google Mesh WiFi supports both 2.4GHz and 5GHz WiFi signals. One "nice" feature of Google Mesh WiFi is that for both frequencies, the WiFi network you create will only have one name. This eliminates the confusion when you try to add devices to your home WiFi network because there is only one network to connect to. However, this also created big problem when connecting Google Home devices, because there was no way to specify if you want to connect a device to the 2.4GHz network or the 5GHz network. After I successfully connected my main Google Home to my Google Mesh WiFi, installing Google Home mini turned disastrous. Following the app flow to install mini would get stuck and no error message is given on why it would get stuck.

The funniest part was that when I called Google Home support line, the support staff actually told me that Google Home devices are not compatible with Google Mesh WiFi! Come on Google, you can't even make your own products work together?

Of course, that customer service representative just didn't know what he was talking about, and the knowledge base he used to search for solutions didn't return a viable solution. There is actually a way to get them working together!

The core problem with the set up is really that all the Google Home devices need to be on the same WiFi frequency. Of course, I wish Google would have either:

1. enabled Google Mesh WiFi to take care of this, or

2. allowed me to specify which WiFi frequency to use when connecting Google Home mini to my WiFi network, or

3. at least returned informative error messages on the limitation.

After hours spent troubleshooting to identify this problem, I finally found the solution: you can force all your Google Home devices to connect only to the 2.4GHz WiFi network.

The benefit of 5GHz WiFi is that you can get higher throughput, meaning you can transfer data much faster. However, the benefit of 2.4GHz WiFi is that the WiFi signal can travel much further. Typical range for 2.4GHz WiFi signal is 150 feet (46m) indoor and 300 feet (92m) outdoor. The range for 5GHz is only one third of that. So in order to make sure you only connect to the 2.4GHz WiFi network, you just have to make sure you are far away from your router (or your Google Mesh WiFi nodes).

So there I was, outside my home a long distance away from my router with a long extension cord on a code rainy night way past midnight, using my smart phone to make sure I could only connect to my 2.4GHz WiFi and not my 5GHz WiFi, and then one after another, installing my Google Home series devices. But at least I proved the Google Home CSR was wrong! Google Mesh WiFi and Google Home devices DO WORK TOGETHER!

Well, once I got them working, they worked pretty well since, and I never had to reconfigure them again. So if you were also struggling to get them working together, now you know how.

Best luck with all your daily battles!

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: How to get rid of unwanted items in your Google Calendar

If you use Google Calendar, you probably noticed recently that a lot of extra events just start to pop up in your calendar, such as hotels you reserved and flights you booked, meeting invitation you received, or worse, notifications on the prize money you just won with bogus phishing links embedded such as this one below:

So what is going on?

This is actually the results of Google AI trying to be smart and convenient for you by scanning your emails and then automatically adding items to your calendar. However, Google messed up by allowing spam invitations sent to your to also show up in your Google Calendar even though your Gmail correctly classified it as spam and shoved it into the spam folder.

On the other hand, it might be convenient for some people to have their travel itinerary automatically inserted into their calendars based on email confirmation they receive, some people might not want that at all! And guess what, I am one of them!!

My wife works as a travel agent, and she sometimes forwards me emails containing hotel reservations and flight info so I can track the credit card charges. Google AI just automatically assumed that I was traveling and then spammed the heck out of my calendar with all these events I have no interest tracking. And it would have been better if I got an email asking me if I want to opt into such "smart" service. But nope, Google just decided to make that the default.

Whining aside, how can you turn these things off and get life back to normal? Let me show you:

Go to Google Calendar and then click the gear icon to get into settings. Then uncheck "Automatically add events from Gmail to my calendar" under Events from Gmail.

Next go to Event settings and change the selection under Automatically add invitations to "Yes, but don't send event notification unless I have responded".

That should disable the evil Google AI from trying to determine your calendar for you!

Moving on to my next battles!!

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: Volume Control Stops Working in Windows 10 After Windows Update

Before I begin, I must say that this is working! Writing and venting about all these daily battles I endure is actually making me feel happier!! Of course, I hope all you readers out there also felt happier too, whether because now you know how to fight your battles, or simply because you felt your life is better after witnessing my struggles. 😜

Since I was on the topic of windows update breaking things for me in my previous post, let me describe another battle I had to fight, again because of Terrible Windows Updates! This event actually happened a while back. But because of the amount of time I had to spend fixing it, it for sure will linger in my mind for an extended time.

As I mentioned before, one of the many existences of Philip, my virtual smart home butler, is on this super old Windows 10 desktop machine that my boss, ehh, I mean my wife, threw away over 10 years ago. I connected a BlueTooth receiver to this box and then hooked up my whole home speaker system to the receiver. This way Philip has a way to speak to everyone no matter where he/she is in the house. Through this set up, Philip can also manage tasks such as music playing, greeting the King (only the King, not the Queen or anyone else) when he comes home, announcements on visitors/lurkers/intruders detected etc., and mundane things such as telling the young masters to practice piano, do homework, clean room, go to bed, yada yada yada. So on that day when Philip started yelling at everybody on top of his lung throughout the day, I knew something had gone terribly wrong.

When everyone is unhappy with Philip, guess what, Lanny has to troubleshoot right away. Philip controls the volume of his voice through Window's built in volume mixer as shown below. The BlueTooth receiver shows up as a headphone in the volume mixer, and when volume of the System Sounds changes, the volume of the headphone also changes at the same time. However, that no longer behaved the same way. Even though the volume slider of the headphone moves together with the system sounds slider, the volume did not change and remained maximum.

Restarting windows didn't help. Restarting the BlueTooth receiver was useless. Deleting the BlueTooth device and reconnect didn't make a difference.

Since I am one of the first few to notice this problem (it is pretty hard to ignore everyone yelling at you, Philip, the Queen, the young masters), there wasn't much resources online on how to resolve the problem. After hours of troubleshooting, I finally nailed the culprit. YES, AGAIN, IT IS WINDOWS UPDATE BREAKING THINGS THAT USED TO WORK JUST FINE.

What I had to do to resolve the issue was to uninstall the automatically installed Windows Update, disable Windows Auto Update, and then search for an older version of the BlueTooth driver to replace the one on my computer.

Of course, many, many people's ears also suffered and complained and begged for help such as here and here and here.

In case you are still suffering from this problem and your ears are still hurting everyday, the best solution is:

1.    Open Windows Registry (regedit.exe).
2.    Jump to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Bluetooth\Audio\AVRCP\CT
3.    Create REG_DWORD DisableAbsoluteVolume and set its value to 1.
4.    Restart Windows.

Just another daily battle I had to fight, and another interesting episode of living with Philip, my virtual smart home butler, together with a few non-voluntary human test subjects...

Ciao!

Listen to one of Philip's favorite radio stations on Pandora:

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: Task Scheduler Error - The specified account name is not valid

Microsoft Windows systems have a built in utility called Task Scheduler that can be actually quite handy when you need to schedule things to run on a fixed schedule with some flexibility in conditions. It is probably used more by system admins on the Windows Server family of products to schedule maintenance work or kick off certain routine jobs.

I use Task Scheduler mainly for scheduling routine work for Philip Jane, my home-brewed Smart Home Assistant, such as reminding my kids that they are going to be late for school, or it is time to go to bed. By the way, the name Philip comes from the book The Outcast by Maoni and Jane comes from the Ender's Game series by Orson Scott Card, both I highly recommend. I used to write my own scheduler, until one day I realized that I could just use this existing utility and save myself a bunch of work. So I incorporated this as part of the Philip Jane microservice ecosystem. It has been working great for many years, until this morning.

School season has just started, so I was turning some expired tasks back on, so Philip Jane can dutifully provide friendly reminders to my kids (so I don't have to). As I was saving the changes, I got an error message saying The specified account name is not valid.

Mind you that the system has been working for years and I had never ran into this problem. As an expert in Windows system (I used to make a living as a system admin), I sincerely rebooted the physical machine (one of Philip's many existences) that hosted Philip's scheduler functionalities, hoping that would resolve the problem, which it didn't. Now the research began. Sure enough, I am not the only one who suffered.

Turned out once again (and again and again and again), the culprit is a recent Windows Update. The update now requires local user name to explicitly include the server name. Even though I am not running a Windows server, the same restriction applies to all Windows 10 systems that had the latest update. So instead of using Lanny as the login name, now I have to explicitly use Philip\Lanny as the login name.

If this is what Microsoft wants, then why still default to the local user name when task scheduler prompts for a login is beyond me. But at least this allowed me to proceed.

Here's a discussion of the exact problem on TechNet, under Windows Server 2019 support. TechNet is the big knowledge repo for all Microsoft related support docs.

TechNet Discussion

But I want to go back to the real culprit again. This is a Windows 10 update forced upon me by Microsoft. And every time when I install Windows Update, I am always under the fear that something used to work will break. That is just not a great user experience. But hey, I am not the only one complaining, and I don't think complaining works when it comes to Microsoft.

For those of you that also ran into this problem, hope this blog post helps!


BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: Google Hangouts Sending Messages To Yourself

Google Hangouts (used to be called Google Talk) is a free chat app provided by Google that supports WiFi calls, video conferencing in addition to the basic text messaging capabilities. It is the main way of communication between my teenage daughter and me when she is at school and I am at work, because I am a GOOD parent and held my ground firm and still refuse to give her a smart phone (which makes her kind of unique in her social groups).

Recently, whenever I send her a Google Hangout message, I would also get the notification on my phone for that message I just sent her. And this is becoming really annoying!!

Searched online but couldn't find much useful info. Then it just dawned on me. In my recent troubleshooting with Google Home setup, I had to add my daughter's Google account to my Google Home set up in order to properly grant permissions for different users. Could this be the problem?

By the way, if you don't already know, Google Home is a Google-made smart speaker/voice assistant like Amazon's Echo, which can be used to control smart home devices, translate, perform knowledge look up, play music, and used as a timer.

Upon removing my daughter's Google Account from within the Google Home app, sure enough, the notification stopped when I messaged her once gain in Google Hangouts app. Mystery solved! The underline problem is that Google Hangouts and Google Home apps both use the Android underneath Google Account(s) set up to determine what's the proper action to take. But since Google is NOTORIOUS for one project group not caring about another project group's work, end users ended up having a bad experience and had to troubleshoot by themselves.

This reminds me of the fight I had with Google Home Mini not working with Google Mesh WiFi, and the fight I had with Google Home multiple account/owner issues earlier. But those would be the contents of another Daily Battles blog post.

Happy Fighting!

Video of the Day:

This video of Kangaroos Hopping in Snow somehow 
is really bringing peace to my mind!!

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

A great summary article on what happened inside Google for the last three years

Sharing a good read, an article on WIRED summarizing all the events happened inside Google for the last three years. WIRED talked with 47 current and former Google employees and then produced a great story explaining the bumpy road Google had to take in the last three years. The article was written by NITASHA TIKU, a senior writer at WIRED.

THREE YEARS OF MISERY INSIDE GOOGLE, THE HAPPIEST COMPANY IN TECH

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: Everything About End-to-End Sprinkler Repair

A typical yearly routine for an American suburban family during spring time is to fix their sprinkler system. It always amazes me that the sprinkler system can't just stay functional and would always require some form of repair after each winter. Is this something the sprinkler parts manufactures conspired together to make more money from consumers while making their life miserable on a fixed schedule?

This year, I had to go through some extended effort to restore my sprinkler system back to normal. Here I share some knowledge I learned so you know what to do if this happens to you.

First, the Easy and Normal Stuff 

If all you have to do is to twist off the leaking sprinkler head, or event better, just the top part  (with the hole where water comes out) above ground, you are in luck! These parts are general very cheap at the local hardware store. The only hassles you have to go through are to locate the leak, make a trip to the store, and then replace them.

If a connecting pipe is leaking or broken, dig down around the sprinkler head so you can get to the broken part is pretty much the only extra work you have to do. Special tools (to untwist the broken part by grabbing into the plastic part in the opposite direction) might be needed.

If an underground PVC pipe is leaking, you might need to do some extra digging to expose the troubling section. Then just cut the broken section with a cable saw (so you don't have to dig a much bigger trench), then replace it with extendable PVC joints you can easily get at the local hardware store. You can glue it on, or get the more expensive twist on parts.


Next, the Sprinkler Controller

You should be able to find a sprinkler controller box somewhere in your house, most likely in your garage. This controller box lets you schedule the start time and watering duration of the various stations (zones) of your sprinkler system.

Typically, the control box is directly plugged into an outlet for power while also have a battery inside. So in case there's a power outage, you don't lose all your settings in the control box.

Turned out that the battery is a crucial part of the system, and I learned it the hard way. After hours of troubleshooting different part of my entire sprinkler system, I finally identified the problem. My controller wouldn't turn on the water stations (plus all kinds of weird stuff) even though it is plugged into a power outlet all because the 9V battery inside was low on juice. After replacing the battery, things started working again! So always check your battery as a first step of troubleshooting your sprinkler system.


Moving On to the Sprinkler Valve Box

When I tested the different stations, one station simply does not have any water coming out of the sprinkler heads. Another station would generate a lot of clicking sounds and all the sprinkler heads would shoot water straight up like a geyser periodically. After researching and consulting experts at the local HomeDepot, I found out that the problem could be related to the solenoid and diaphragms inside.

Solenoid is the black device inside the sprinkler valve box in charge of turning on and off a water station (zone). First thing to try is to take the solenoid apart and wash the diaphragm. Debris or sand in dirty diaphragm could cause the solenoid to malfunction.

I cleaned my two diaphragms for the two problematic water stations, and they remained problematic.

The next thing to try is to replace the problematic solenoid. It is important that you get the right brand of solenoid because different brands could have different sizes. I ended up buying my solenoids from a specialty store, because HomeDepot and Lowe's didn't carry the brand of solenoid I needed to replace mine.

After I replaced my two solenoids for the two problematic water stations, one started working while the other one kept shooting out periodic geysers with clicking sounds just like before. To understand things better, I swapped the two solenoids. Still, the station that got fixed remained fixed while the one shooting out geysers kept shooting out geysers. This was a good indication that the problem with the station shooting out geysers had nothing to do with the solenoid. In other words, I didn't really have to replace that one. Well! At least I fixed one bad station. That's progress.


Back to the Sprinkler Controller

In the sprinkler controller box, I found a station without any wire connected to the screw and a loose wire not connected to any station. In the valve box, I also found a wire not connected to any of my solenoids. So I connected the remaining bad water station solenoid to this wire and connected the loose wire to the extra station. After turning the station on, no clicking sound and no periodic geyser now. In fact, nothing happened.

To make sure I was not going crazy, I disconnected the solenoid from the extra station and then simply swapped wires between the two stations I worked on. As soon as I did the swap, the station that had the clicking sounds and periodic geysers started working correctly, and the station that I had fixed before now stopped working. I was completely bewildered.

Not until I consulted a friend who had much deeper knowledge about sprinkler systems did I find out that for the same sprinkler controller box, individual stations can go bad on their own. So having most stations working correctly with a controller doesn't mean all stations will work correctly. Also the wires are actually color coded, so I should make sure the wire I connect in the control box should match the color of the wire I am connecting in the valve box. No wonder I couldn't get the extra station to work, because I AM COLORBLIND!!

Now understanding things much better, I simply rewired the problematic water station wire to the extra station. And voila, water came out of sprinkler heads horizontally instead of vertically, and there's no more clicking sound. Turned out this station is a good station.

So really the problems I had was a bad control station in the control box and a bad solenoid for another station. I got unlucky because I replaced a perfectly fine solenoid. I also got real lucky because I had an extra functioning station I could swap to.


The Bonus

As I was troubleshooting the entire sprinkler system, I noticed that the water station labels and the actually wiring didn't match. I actually have a non-labeled, but wired station. Turning on this station for a quick test revealed that this is actually for a dripping system for some of my trees in the front yard. Turned out that for the five years I have lived in this house, I have never turned this station on and never watered those trees. No wonder those poor trees are getting weaker and weaker (wife mentioned about color change of these trees, but of course, I couldn't tell, because I AM COLORBLIND!).

Anyway, all the mystery have been solved. And I have another year minus two months of peace before I have to mess with sprinkler system repairs again. And now that I know much more about the system, something else that I don't know will break next time.

Hope you enjoyed reading this for whatever reason you came to my blog! 😌 At least now you are equipped with more knowledge of sprinkler system repairs, so when your sprinkler system breaks, it's probably from something I didn't write about in my blog post. 😜 Just kidding!


BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: Lexus Default Display Screen and Default Settings

We bought a Lexus Hybrid a few months back, because our old car was totaled in an accident. Since then we have been fighting the various settings in the car.

Default Sensitivity for Adaptive Cruise Control

A nice feature that came with the car was called Radar Adaptive Cruise Control, which seems to be a common feature for newer cars these days. It uses the onboard radar to detect how far it is from the car in front and will automatically accelerate/decelerate while in cruise control mode to keep a safe distance from the car in front, whether that car is accelerating or decelerating. It is really a useful feature in busy traffic, so the driver doesn't have to step on gas or brake again and again just to follow traffic.

However, every time the Adaptive Cruise Control is on, the Vehicle-to-Vehicle setting is always set to Long (3 bars), and I always have to manually adjust it to Medium and then Short (1 bar). This gets super annoying if Adaptive Cruise Control is turned off because my speed is too low or because I hit the break. Then every time I re-enable cruise control, I have to manually set it to low each time.

Why do I always have to change it from Long? Because at Long, my car will keep a distance of 160 ft. (50 meters) from the car in front of me. And guess what happens if I do that in busy traffic? People behind me will hunk at me, and cars by my sides will for sure cut right in front of me, significantly increase the risk of a collision.

There seems to be a default sensitivity I can set to Short while I am parked. However, as soon as the engine starts and when I turn on cruise control, sensitivity goes right back to Long. Turned out Lexus want to make sure the default sensitivity is reset back to Long each time when cruise control is enabled for the safety of the driver, even though they also designed a UI where the driver is deceived into believing the default sensitivity setting can actually be changed.

So what is the solution? There is none! (Confirmed by experts in the dealership.) So just suck it up and re-program your brain to always hit the manual adjust button twice whenever you use cruise control.  😡

Default Display Screen for Fuel Efficiency

Another nice feature of a hybrid car is that you could be driving off battery or charging the battery while you drive. Under the Info screen, you can choose to look at a screen that shows you in real time if the car is charging the battery or running off the battery. You can also choose to look at a bar graph that shows your gas milage for the current trip in 5 minutes bins. These two screens, naturally, became our favorite screens and we really wanted to make them the default screen whenever we start the car. Well, turned out there is no way to set a default screen for the display.

What about just go back to the previous screen when the car was last turned off? Under Settings - General, there is actually this setting called Auto Screen Change. If you set it to Off, it should stay on the last screen you were on when you turned off the car.

But guess what? That works with the Media screen, the Radio screen, the Map screen, the Weather screen, but not anything under the Info screen. (Again, confirmed by experts in the dealership.)

The only thing I eventually found is that I could leave the bar graph screen on the smaller side of the split screen, and it actually stays. Guess that's just what I have to live with.

Full Screen vs Split Screen

The car comes with this nice big display screen where you can see the current configuration for climate control, audio, map, weather, text messages from your phone, and many more. Naturally, I prefer to see things in full screen, instead of a split screen where information seemed to be cluttered. Many Lexus support web sites also clearly indicated that a driver can switch between full screen mode and split screen mode at will.

But guess what? Turned out you can only switch between full screen mode and split screen mode for the following: the Initial screen (the warning message screen), the Menu screen, and the Map screen. (Confirmed by reading the 800-page owner's manual.)

Conclusion

The UI design for Lexus cars leaves a lot to be desired. Just accept that fact that life is not perfect. Some battles you just can't win.

Moving on to my next daily battle!


BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com