reliable cost competitive vfds

ganutenator

Lifetime Supporting Member
ganutenator
Join Date
May 2002
Location
kansas
Posts
1,440
schneider is getting a little too snobish.

we buy over 300 vfd's a year. and only 300 because we can only make one machine a week.

moving to a bigger facility where we plan to double or triple that.

how are vfd sales people not knocking down are door for this quantity.
 
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Can I ask what sizes are you looking for in terms of horsepower? What type of communications are you looking for? How "Smart" do the drives need to be, are you doing calculations in the drives, speed feedback, follower applications?
 
dumb drives. we are doing calculations based off of decel only. we are passing speeds in via modbus serial rtu, but we are flexible.
 
Consider Mitsubishi. Previous life I provided sales support for their products. I won't recommend any of their PLCs, but for drives you should be able to get a pretty good price at that quantity. I felt their drives were pretty solid but do have some limitations on form factors if you are putting these somewhere other than a control panel.

https://us.mitsubishielectric.com/fa/en/about-us/distributors
 
Last batch of Vacon's I got were just rebranded Eaton SVX9000's or vise versa, good drives can't remember the price difference between them and the actual svx.

At that volume I do find it odd that reps are wining and dining you.
 
labeledas said:
Last batch of Vacon's I got were just rebranded Eaton SVX9000's or vise versa, good drives can't remember the price difference between them and the actual svx.

At that volume I do find it odd that reps are wining and dining you.
Click to expand...
Vacon/Danfoss is the mfr, Eaton is the brand label.

A-B PowerFlex 523s if you don't need any comms other than Modbus. You might be surprised at how competitive they are with these in volume.
 
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Eaton DG1, Toshiba AS3

AFAIK Schneider doesn't have territory-exclusive reps, so shop around. I have at least 3 Schneider guys in my area.
 
ganutenator said:
1/4 hp, 208 3 phase
Click to expand...

I ran a quick price through one of our distributors on a half horse VFD, that's less than $40,000 for 300 drives. Some folks spend that much and more on ONE drive.

Could be they are off chasing a bigger fish....or you need a better distributor. Probably a little of both.

We use ABB, AB, and Yaskawa.
 

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