Oh, The Misery…My Drive Just Alarmed on Over Temperature - What do I do now?

Oh, the pain...the misery…the teeth gnashing and, oh yeah, the cursing!  Your drive just alarmed on overtemperature, your equipment has stopped, production has ceased, and you are wasting time and money.  Can the drive be saved?  The good news is…YES!

But before it comes to this point, consider this:  We all know HEAT is the root of all evil when it comes to electronic equipment. Combine the heat with a little Dirt and Moisture and you have the electronic axis of evil!

So, start by practicing prevention first:

-  keeping your electrical cabinets CLOSED

-  keeping your VFD FANS  in good REPAIR

-  making sure those cabinent FILTERS are always CLEAN

Eventually, most drives will likely experience overtemperature alarms or deviation/function alarms.  Avoid swapping the top boards to troubleshoot – yes, we know, it usually works out ok.  However, it’s a risky move.  Faulty circuit boards can blow the power modules which then blows the top circuit boards and you end up with more than one machine down!  And you thought you were frustrated BEFORE! 

You can check for the correct base drive voltages on the top board without DC bus voltage.  This can help identify the location of the problem.  Contact your OEM and find out how to check the power modules with an ohmmeter, or give us a call and we can walk you through it 800-962-6355

If you are past the warranty date (you did keep the warranty information didn't you?) and need third-party service on your drive, send us your drive for fast and reliable repair.  We offer free evaluations, a lifetime warranty on both parts AND labor, rush services for emergencies, and outstanding customer service.

Not surprisingly, reliability ranked as the most important criteria in purchasing industrial electronics according to a recent survey by Plant Engineering & Maintenance. 

Reliability was followed, in descending order, by quality, safety, maintenance, service, price, throughput, technology, noise, speed, and “green”.

Maintenance ranked 4th out of 11 so we know it’s pretty high on your list.  Nobody wants equipment that is difficult or excessively expensive to maintain.  Downtime is lost time and lost time is lost money.  

Save money in the long run by purchasing quality industrial electronic equipment with a good warranty.  And when that warranty runs out, or the OEM does not provide responsive service, send your repairs to a reliable expert. 

Industrial equipment, more specifically the individual components that make up the piece of equipment, age at different rates.  A system that includes drives, motors, power supplies, monitors, and sensors that work together to complete a task, will all have elements fail at different times in part because of the different dates of manufacture of each piece of equipment but also because of differing levels of stress that the internal components of the equipment are subjected to. A Variable Frequency Drive (VFD) outputs higher voltage and current to a motor than say a power supply outputting to an analog relay board. The everyday high voltage and current the VFD operates with will reduce the life of unit much more quickly than the power supply does. Electrolytic capacitors tend to dry out, electromechanical relays tend to have dirty contacts, batteries tend to discharge while at the same time most semiconductors tend to age very well showing virtually no signs of degradation due to aging alone.

Lets look at a couple of real life examples:

1. An emergency hard down situation.Your machine has gone down and your maintenance personnel have done their troubleshooting and determined that the drive that controls one of the motors is the most likely failure.  You don’t have a spare and a new drive must be built by the manufacturer and won’t ship for 9-12 weeks.  Your only option is to send it to your repair house and request an expedited repair.  You get it to them and they begin their troubleshooting, but the only thing you have communicated is that it is not working. It has a tag that reads "Broke" or "Not working" or "Failed" or any other very ambiguous description. The repair technician sees no visual evidence of failure, so that technician has to start testing and troubleshooting every section of the unit  to find the problem. This can be very time consuming.The entire time, your company is losing money, because you are not making product, your production line is still down.Not to mention the fact that the Plant Manager is camped out in your office for anxiously waiting for your updates. Had your repair vendor been informed that the drive was not communicating with feedback circuit from the encoder on the motor, the technician could have gone right to that area, troubleshooting only that area of the drive and only those components. This would have fixed your drive in a fraction of the time and your line would have been up and running much, much sooner.

2. Much more often what happens is you have a failure and the problem is discovered.The failed unit is replaced by one of the spares on your shelf and your production is quickly restored and all is well....for the time being. Over the next few months this happens a few more times and your inventory of spares gets critically low. Now you have to go to the pile of failed units and send them out to get repaired, but you can’t remember what the symptoms were, so the fault description again reads “Not Working” or "Failed" or "Broke".  Your repair vendor gets them and quotes you in the maximum repair cost, because they know they are going to have to spend substantially more time troubleshooting and repairing the fault. Additionally, the likelihood of overlooking something increases when the area of fault is unknown, because even a tested unit may not reveal intermittent problems like the operational stress of high machine duty cycles or limited ventilation causing overheating.

Send a detailed fault description and save yourself hours of headaches and hairpulling stress.