Joseph,
I tried to post a picture of a simple test stand we made using a five gallon bucket, some plumbing parts and some concrete. It is portable and you can hook up to the hose at your wash station or any quick coupler. Send me your email address and I will send you the picture.
Seleniods are best checked with an ohm meter. A new Toro solenoid should read around 28 ohms any amount significant + or - and the solenoid is probably bad. If you want to activate the selenoid when it is on your test stand you can do that by hooking it up to an irrigation controller, using one of the purchased solenoid activators as mentioned in the previous post or the poor man's way of doing it is with three 9 volt batteries. Take three 9 volt batteries and turn one upside down and plug the pos to neg of one of the other batteries and the neg to the pos of the other battery. Now you have pos and neg exposed posts left. Attached one wire of your solenoid to the pos post and the other wire to the neg post. If the solenoid is good the sprinkler head should turn on. This can also be done in the field with this 9v battery setup at the head or by disconnecting the station wire and common wirer at the controller.
Turfnet got Toro to do three webinars on irrigation electrical trouble shooting. I have not watched them in their entirety, but if you don't have a good background in irrigation trouble shooting this would be a good place to start. The webinars a archived under the Turfnet free webinars. The electrical irrigation trouble shooting class at GIS put on by the Irrigation Association is also 1st class and will you will gain a lot of knowledge.
For faceplate testing I was fortunate to buy a used controller which hangs on the office wall five feet away from the irrigation computer and runs the nursery green sprinkler heads. When I have computer to field communication problems I can isolate this controller from the rest of the field and quickly determine if the problem is the computer, field interface unit (we use Toro Sitepro) or the field communication wiring. So I don't have to go outside and look to see what sprinklers are running, don't want to run any water or sometimes it is winter and the system is shut down I made a light board using 12-24 vdc led lights. The dc lights will work on ac selenoids just like the 9 dc volt batteries activate ac selenoids. One light per station all hooked to the same connecting strip used for the field wiring. This way I can just unplug the field wiring and connect the light board to see what stations are operating. This controller is also great for checking faceplate communication boards with the computer.
Jack Tripp
La Crosse Country Club
Onalaska, WI
jtripp@centurytel.net