“Technical support on line 2” is a commonly heard telephone page here at EMA. We try hard to be helpful to anyone calling and needing variable frequency drive (VFD) support, whether or not they’re an existing customer.
There are many times when we can indeed help someone get their variable frequency drive running again just by talking to them on the phone and providing VFD support. We’re happy to provide VFD support, and we feel that it serves to enhance our reputation as the “go-to” people where drives and controls are concerned. (NOTE: IF you require VFD support right now, click the “Live Support” icon, or hit the contact link at the top right of this page)
Obviously, there are times when we can’t, because the problem is simply too complex. In these cases, we can offer to provide an in-house shop repair of the VFD or drive, or field service.
If the damage seems beyond repair, then we can suggest a replacement.
Here’s a quick look inside our thinking on VFD technical support telephone calls.
- We don’t want to get anyone hurt. We repair both low and medium voltage VFDs every day, but we’re well aware that others do not. We never want to be responsible for someone unfamiliar with testing high energy circuits to sustain an injury or worse. To that end, we will usually say something like “IF you’re comfortable and familiar with measuring 3 phase voltage, then check your incoming power line and tell me what you see.”
- We don’t want to make the situation worse. We occasionally get calls for VFD support about a drive running in a process machine that is exhibiting some intermittent failure, or is slightly unstable. We’ll try to help, but we will warn you that adjusting gains on a running machine can have significant consequences. We’ll again say something like, “if you’re familiar with adjusting parameters and gains while the machine is running, then perhaps you could try to …. “
- We can only troubleshoot so far on the phone. If you tell us that a VFD running a blower is tripping off on over-voltage during deceleration, we can probably help you resolve that right on the phone. But if you tell us that your rewinder isn’t winding all materials the same, then we’re probably going to run out of vfd telephone support options pretty quickly.
We will, in every case, make a good faith effort at helping you. We try to only hire technicians that are friendly in the first place, so their natural tendency is to be courteous and helpful to you when you call.
We truly do believe that “No one, Anywhere, is better at drives than we are.” We have a number of interesting blogs on our site that deal with specific VFD problems. Click https://emainc.net/ema-inc-norcross-ga-tech-articles/ and look them over.
Eddie