# AltiStart 48 Issues



## BBQ (Nov 16, 2010)

Glen Walker said:


> Do any of you have experience with the Square D/Telemechanique *(French for Plastic)*


I am sorry I do not but thank you for the great laugh. :thumbup::thumbup:


----------



## John Valdes (May 17, 2007)

Install line reactors if they are not already installed.


----------



## nolabama (Oct 3, 2007)

Lol. French for plastic. I like and will use that one. No only one cabinet of mine is telemechanique


----------



## JRaef (Mar 23, 2009)

I try to be fair in places like this because I now work for a competitor of Schneider, but my experiences with ATS48s predate that employment status. When I ran my own company, I had similar issues. I lost a very big customer of mine (Chevron) over them. I think they are marginal at best and although they never admitted it, I think the problem is that they are designing for 415V 50Hz and saying they are "OK" for 460V motors by looking at the min-max tolerances of the 415V design. But what they don't seem to get is that our service is really 480V in this country and tends to climb on occasion to near (or over) 500V, so that becomes WAY out of tolerance for their components. Their Services guys kept telling me that my problems were all due to excess heat because I had retrofitted them into MCCs, but I had run the entire design past THEIR Applications Engineers before I did it and _they_ gave me the go-ahead! When I sent the failed units in for evaluation (8 failures in 3 months on 6 installed units!), they said they that the SCRs had shorted from getting too hot. But I had worked for a Soft Starter mfr, I KNOW how to test SCRs, there were ZERO shorted SCRs on the ones I had sent in, they all had control board failures. So they were not testing them at all, they were just lying to me. I eventually yanked them all out and installed Motortronics starters in their place, never had another problem.

So do you know anything about what kind of failures you are having? Are the SCRs shorting? I have a lot of troubleshooting experience with soft starters, I'll give you some guidance, but you need to know more about what's going wrong. Generally though if the SCRs are shorting after "a storm going through", that tends to be the result of nearby lightning strikes or other grid related surges or spikes during the storm, i.e. someone hits a power pole and the lines come together etc. etc.. SCRs are somewhat susceptible to rapid changes in voltage, called DV/DT (D=Delta meaning change), so a rapid voltage change can cause the SCRs to "self commutate" which means they fire without being told to fire. If multiple SCRs fire at the same time out of sequence, that can result in a current surge through the motor, which then damages the SCRs. A really good surge / lightning arrestor might be in order if you don't already have one. If you do, is it the type that indicates when it's no longer good? One problem with cheaper ones is that they sacrifice themselves in the line of duty, but you don't know that.


----------



## Glen Walker (Dec 30, 2009)

Up to this point we have had control board failures. Ive run into the same issues, the previous 3 that were sent in for repair were all tested and the SCR's tested fine, but it was the control boards that were fried. And like you I was told by the factory guys that they found shorted SCR's, but I know how they work, and it was a fixed cost for repair so we just went forward and swallowed. On todays adventure we actually have another issue. This time we actually have two of the phases shorted (4 SCRs reading shorted) and one thats fine on the first soft starter. The second soft starter has all of its SCR's shorted. We have found evidence in the pit of where we had a lightning strike and believe it fed back in on the load side of the SS burning up our SCR's. Our Lightning Arrestors are on the Line Side naturally and at the time the pumps were not running so the soft starter took the full force of the surge. Amazing enough the control board is still opertional, or it appears as such. I do believe that a load side reactor might give us some additionl protection, but Im like you in that I think they have entirely too tight of a tolernce and perhaps it is based on a 400V/50Hz unit. We are bringing both of the units back to our shop to see if we can replace the shorted SCR's with some from another unit that has a bad control board. I have been looking for specifications on these units, something like resistance readings, or other points to check while we have it in the shop. I am not looking forward to the conversation with the district manager from the quarry company, and telling him that yet another POS AltiStart has bit the dust.... I think he might bite on trying a couple of Benshaw's in there next time......


----------



## guest (Feb 21, 2009)

Wild thought here..any chance of installing a buck transformer on the inputs to those drives to get the voltage down closer to what they can tolerate? (For the control board issues that is, I did read that a lightning hit got into the motor side of the drives this time.) 

And on the current blowout, would load reactors help against lightning damage? My instinct says nope.


----------



## JRaef (Mar 23, 2009)

mxslick said:


> Wild thought here..any chance of installing a buck transformer on the inputs to those drives to get the voltage down closer to what they can tolerate? (For the control board issues that is, I did read that a lightning hit got into the motor side of the drives this time.)
> 
> And on the current blowout, would load reactors help against lightning damage? My instinct says nope.


If you reduce the voiltage on the input side to "protect" the soft starter PC boards, you are also reducing the voltage to the motor, so you will reduce the torque, making them slip more, pull more current for the same work, heat up and burn out quicker.

Your instinct is correct. Load reactors would not protect against lightning. 

Even lightning arrestors will not really protect against a direct hit by the way. That's why they call it an "Act of God", there is really nothing you can do about it, just accept it as part of living on earth. Lightning arrestors protect against the EFFECTS of a lightning strike somewhere off in the distance that is already dampened BY the distance. The only way to try to avoid damage is to try to get the lightning to strike something else that can take the hit and is easily replaced, i.e. a lightning rod.


----------



## John Valdes (May 17, 2007)

Line reactors also will not prevent lightning damage. Not much will. But they will prevent nuisance trips on dirty or compromised input power. Or when a power correction cap opens or closes.
I did not know you were losing components as you did not mention that in the OP.


----------



## Glen Walker (Dec 30, 2009)

*r*

Sorry I didn't clarify that we were loosing components. Sometimes I think faster than my fingers can keep up. But yes they have actually lost 5 starters at this location. In this instance insurance will be covering the damage, but this will be the first time. Load reactors were discussed but dismissed. This may be one of those instances where simpler is better and across the line starters are the best low cost option.


----------



## millelec (Nov 20, 2010)

we use old style autotransformer soft starts. pretty rugged stuff, and no solid state devices that get unhappy when lightning starts dancing.


http://www.geindustrial.com/cwc/Dispatcher?REQUEST=PRODUCTS&pnlid=3&famid=35&catid=110&id=s-rv-cr


----------

