When to upgrade... SLC to CompactLogix

geniusintraining

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I have a customer that has several L36ERM's running SLC's racks (A13's) via AENTR, yesterday I was working on their SLC as they had a NR8 fail, they asked when is time to upgrade all the SLC hardware to CompactLogix, the end of life date has not been set yet by Rockwell...

My thoughts (im cheap) and I told them, buy spares for the SLC's and they should be good for 5ish years then start moving them over.

Anyone like to share your thoughts
 
Well we all know the SLC's are going away sometime in the next decade or so. Depending on the size of the installation. I would come up with a multi-year plan. If they have some type of scheduled outage every year, plan on replacing one or more systems per year during the outage. The goal would to have them all replaced in the next 5 years or so. Keep the pulled equipment as spares for the remaining systems.

The planned multi-year change out makes it easier to budget, and sell to management.
 
I had the exact same scenario at a plant I work at. They've been using older SLC models 5/04 which were not on the network for a long time. As we came into the plant, the first goal was to migrate everything onto the network. Therefore, we used the AENTR cards to convert the SLC racks into "remote IO" for the main ControlLogix.

As other projects came into play & required new panels, we decided to revisit the SLC racks. The new panel was equipped with a PointIO rack onto which we migrated all the existing wiring from the SLC rack. I don't believe that we would have done the conversion unless we could justify it with the other project; we were going down for construction either way and the cost of the extra materials to make it happen was minimal. Not to mention, they can use the parts recovered through this for older areas of the plant.
 
A couple of my customers realize that industrial electronics do have a in-service life and these parts get phased out of production, making room for the new stuff. On average, I would say 10 years is the max I've witnessed.

On the other hand, its a fire drill for the customers that wait until the parts fail, can't get replacements, and have to upgrade. Very expensive, in lost production, and getting someone to rush a solution using the new stuff.
 
Thanks guys, I have taken Ken's advice and past it on as I think that would be a great plan and keeping their old racks for the spare parts until all the conversions were done is a great idea and should save them money there also

They are good about upgrading the hardware as the L36ERM's were not cheap and they have FW V21 so that does mean it was a while ago so its time to finish as I think this was the plan at that time
 

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