Hello everyone,

I’m Craig Chamberlain with Precision Electric, and today we’re going to be wiring an SMVector Variable Frequency Drive.

We’re going to be doing a series of videos that will go over essentially everything you need to do from beginning to end for the SMVector Drive – and obviously we need to start with wiring because you can’t do a whole lot of programming if you don’t have any power on it.

Now we have been selling the SMVector Drive for over a decade. It’s a very popular product. We love it, we do a lot of local integration with it, and we also do a lot of actual real application retrofits with it. It’s very cost effective and you can do a lot of diverse applications with the programming.

So essentially to get started, you may have two or three different types of configurations for your wiring. In our case we have a standard wall wiring which would be one hot wire, one neutral wire, and one ground wire. Our black is hot, our white is neutral, and our green is ground. Now not everybody’s house was wired properly or facility was wired properly, so always double check to find out which wire is which. Obviously, hire an electrician if you don’t know how to do that yourself because wiring is dangerous.

What I’ll be doing is I’ll be wiring the hot wire to my hot lead, and then I’ll wire my neutral wire to my neutral wiring, and my ground to ground of course. Other than that it’s pretty straightforward because you have to essentially fuse one of those wires, or two, or three depending on which ones are hot. A general practice in electronics and electrical wiring in general is if you have any kind of hot lead you want to fuse it. Now the manual itself actually has a diagram so depending on the part number of the drive you’re going to be using, you will wire one section hot and you’ll wire another without a fuse. So let’s go ahead and wire this up.

So as you can see here I’ve got my hot wire wired to L1 and I actually fused this at the circuit breaker. So I fuse any wire that’s going to my drive that’s hot. Then I’ve got my neutral, which is white in my case, wired to Terminal N. If you have a three-phase Drive it actually won’t show N, it’ll be L3 which is where your third hot link will go. For the ground, we have that wire to PE which is just an acronym for ground, and that one in my case is green. So I wired that there.

So for our motor lead wiring, we have three wires that came out of our motor. All three of these wires are going to be hot because it was a three-phase motor. Then we had one extra wire which is our ground wire, which is hopefully green in your case, but typically for a three-phase motor you’re actually going to have three blacks and a green. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to wire those three black wires to U, V, and W, which is on the left side of the terminal strip on the drive. The ground of course wires to the same ground as your line voltage, which is PE again. So now that we have the line voltage and the motor wired, we pretty much just have to power it on. After you put power on it, the LED will light up.

The great thing about these drives is you can actually start them right away. So I’ll go ahead and press the start button. Because right out of the box they are set up to run directly from the keypad with no other configurations necessary. Now you’re still going to want to watch the programming basics video because there’s certain important parameters you’re going to want to set, especially your motor overload, in order to properly protect your motor. But that’s all there is to it.