Opion Poll. best vfd's

ganutenator

Lifetime Supporting Member
Join Date
May 2002
Location
kansas
Posts
1,440
In your opinion, as a vfd customer or supporter or user, what do you think is the most robust vfd.
 
Yaskawa nothing else comes close
They are about 5 years ahead of the closest competition
I heard of that. then i recommended them to my customer, then they failed. still trying to heal from that black eye. next?
 
Our standard is AB power flex 4, 40, 750 series.
switching 4 and 40 to smaller 750 series.
replacing all other brands to the 750 series as they die.

We keep spares on hand to replace the drives.
our local dealer is within an hour from us.

james
 
The best VFD for me is about a lot more than robustness. I deal with a lot of European equipment and they come with a lot of Emerson, Lenze and Schneider drives and I tend to replace Lenze with Schneider. The number one for me is the supplier then the user friendliness of the drive. Yaskawa's drive I like because I can get to what I want in the manual very quickly and I can do whatever I want with the drive with minuets.
Schneider's menu system, which they're so proud of, I dislike a lot and their manual is seriously lacking but we have good suppliers who provide great service and give us reasonable prices. Emerson is a great drive but quite expensive around here and I will never forget the issue I had with it resetting certain parameters to default when I put it in keypad mode, that was just bad, bad design which I understand has been changed with their Unidrive M series. I considered Danfoss briefly but the dealers are morons, at least the two I was referred to by the Danfoss sales rep in Ontario who was very knowledgeable are very helpful and their website is pure ****, a nightmare to navigate. I recall sending them an email after the first time I visited their website for which I never received a reply :confused: I told exactly what I though of their website.

Omron ( I understand it's made by Hitachi) is pure garbage, I had nothing but problems with drives that are one year new and at the same time we have Omron drives that are 18 years old and still work well.

I've used Powerflex 40 once and can't remember anything about it but from the reviews here I just may give it a try or at least get a price for one and see how things go.

I also don't like to see drives without teir removable keypad.
 
I've used Powerflex 40 once and can't remember anything about it but from the reviews here I just may give it a try or at least get a price for one and see how things go.

Go with the 523 or 525 drive. They are the newer replacement of the 40 series and come with a few more features for a lower price. The major different between the 523 and 525 is the Powerflex 525 has ethernet communication and safe torque off options included. If you don't need either of those, you can save a few bucks getting the 523 model.
 
We are switching power flex 4 and 40 series to power flex 700 series, 750 series if at all possible. if not, we will stay with that series. the 520 series is not allowed unless they sneak in. to many spares to keep.

james
 
Zener for me - locally made in Sydney. I do lots of swimming pool work and they have to run on 30ma RCDs - not many can do that without cutting out the filters to ground. I have up to 75kW drives running on standard AB type 30ma RCDs without issue at all. They are also IP66 and can be mounted at the motor without the fear of someone giving them a hose down. The cooling fans are IP66 as well. If one does fail it is repaired the same day.
 
In my opinion a reliable piece of hardware is one that runs on a daily basis for over 10 years without ever having to be touched. Based on that criteria I had 2 model of drives that both exceeded 15 years of operation without ever being touched. One was the AB bulletin 160 and the other were some Danfoss drives. I have to say the Danfoss truly stood up to abuse. There were 8 drives rated at 10HP each running a batch process that lasted an average of 7 minutes per batch. On the startup, the drives would output up to 18HP for up to 30 seconds, then ramp down to 10HP by the end of the cycle as the material was chopped up and lessened the motor load. Given the program had to back off the speed as it approached 18HP to keep the drive from tripping on overload, but ramped back up to 68Hz as the motor load decreased.

Now the drives have proven their reliability, the problem comes in which they are now obsolete. Therefore the problem with the 10 year record is that by the time you find the right drive, it is obsolete and time to start the search again.
 
I've dealt with Schnieder, Siemens, Allen Bradley, Lenze, Mitsubishi, Emerson, honestly, about a dozen different types of drives. Mitsubishi's seem to be pretty tough in general, but all the brands seem to make decent drives. Emerson drives have been plagued with firmware issues (from their tech, he discovered the bug, called an engineer and said we had to wait for a firmware update).

This happened because we informed our distributor we no longer wanted Emerson drives due to certain issues and they sent a tech down to give us training on the drives and he encouraged us to challenge him for various setups. I talked him out of a free network com card though. My only real issue with them is that their interfaces are made for "techy" people, which isn't a problem for me, but the other electricians had some issues setting them up.

Wasn't around long enough to give opinions on other brands though (with the exception of Allen Bradley).

At the end of the day, a drive is a drive. Give it to me, I'll set it up and make it work. I try to pick something with a local distributor that keeps stock on hand.
 
Go with the 523 or 525 drive. They are the newer replacement of the 40 series and come with a few more features for a lower price. The major different between the 523 and 525 is the Powerflex 525 has ethernet communication and safe torque off options included. If you don't need either of those, you can save a few bucks getting the 523 model.

Thanks Helliana, I had a look at the manual for their powerflex 525 and it looked exactly like what I need for an upcoming project and hoped that their price would be reasonable.
I got on their website to download "Connected competent workbench" and was required to register which is already a turnoff but hey, I liked the drive. After about ten minutes of trying to register and their crappy registration form insisting that the postal code I entered is "Invalid". **** them and **** their drives. And that was exactly what I meant that there's a lot more to consider in selecting than how robust it is.
 

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