My wife and I have lived in our 6-year-old house for just over a year now. We have a Rain Bird E-9c sprinkler system that has worked without any problems since we moved in - until this week. This week, we pulled in the garage and my wife saw a strange error flashing on the screen of the controller (image attached). I have not been able to locate such an error in the Rain Bird manual. I did, however, call the Rain Bird tech support, and he said it has to do with the master valve (MV wire in the controller), so that the problem is either with wire itself, the master pump, or the master pump relay.

The problem with that explanation is that my sprinkler system is, as I type, cycling through normally and watering my yard like a pro.

My beef with my sprinkler system is that it will not water on the dates and times I specify in the program. I set it to run twice a week in the middle of the night. When I go to check the sprinkler system in the morning after it was supposed to have watered, I get the aforementioned error. After playing around with the controller, I usually get it to work... until the next time it's supposed to water.

My guess is that it's a controller issue and I'll simply have to get a new one. But I wanted to get some feedback before I do so. Have you seen such an error before? Is there a simple fix I'm missing? Or might there actually be a problem with the relay that allows it to work sometimes and not other times?