Leaking with Lee three ports solenoid valves

PsychosisCollective

Hi,

We have been experiencing recently a lot of solenoid valves leakage on many of our setups and we were wandering if anyone else had problem with them as well. We have been using the silent and regular Lee valves for years and they used to be reliable but the batches we purchased in 2022 has been failing us repeatedly. A lot of them are suddenly starting to leak, some of them are leaking even without having been used before when plugged for the first time, and many of them needs to be calibrated very often as they are not delivering the expected amount of water after a few weeks only. Not sure if it is related to an overall decrease of the quality of production or if we were very unlucky...

In any case, is there any reason why Sanworks recommend to use the three ports valves? Could we use the two ports instead?

Do you know any good alternative to the Lee valves?

Thanks.

Marion

Josh

Hi Marion,

We have heard a few other recent reports of leaking valves. We've resold them used for years with no issue, and I'm in a dialogue with our Lee Company rep about this.

Until very recently, only the 3-port version of the valve was available. After years "in development", the 2-port version was released last year. Unfortunately, unlike the simple driver circuits that can power its predecessor, the 2-channel valve requires a more complex 'spike and hold' driver. The Bpod state machine and our valve driver module both use a high side driver IC to drive the valves. The driver IC has many great features but does not implement a spike-and-hold circuit.

Unfortunately the Lee valves are the go-to valve for dispensing small quantities with gravity flow because they are especially fast at opening and closing. When energized, the valve is fully open in 3ms - about 10x faster than most other solenoids.

I'll post again on this thread when we have a clear response to our inquiry from The Lee Company.

-Josh