Hello everyone, this is Craig Chamberlin with Precision Electric at precision-elec.com. We are your industrial drives, motors, controls specialists; pretty much anything involved in the business to business industrial world we have done, been doing it for a long time.

This video is going to cover fault diagnostic error messages in the SMvector variable frequency drive. Now these drives don’t fault often unless there’s something truly wrong with your setup or with the drive itself. So that’s basically what this video is going to cover is some of the fault message inside the manual. Speaking of which, if you don’t have the manual with you, you should probably have it with you if you are gonna watch any of these videos because we are going to go over the section 5 Troubleshooting and Diagnostics section and we are actually not going to cover all of them. What I am going to cover are the most frequently occuring; we get phone calls, you know, every couple time, every, well, probably couple times every week with somebody dealing with something that’s related to the SMvector drive, not because it’s a bad product, just because we sell hundreds of them. So naturally we run into the few anomalies that do occur and they only really fall into a smaller, specific category of faults. But if you don’t know your fault code or it’s not covered in this video, all the fault message are right in the back of the manual and it does have, what’s kind of nice is it has this status and warning, in other words the fault message, and it tells you kind of a description of what it means and then it give you possible fixes or remedies.

So the first one I want to cover actually is the Fast Current Limit. So it’s an FCL will flash on your screen. Fast Current Limit basically says that you are currently exceeding or your motor is currently exceeding the amount of work or  amount of load that you’ve rated it for, but it isn’t tripped yet, so FCL is basically a warning. So if it does stay in FCL for too long, you’re going to risk getting a current or motor overload fault, which is actually a, let’s find that fault here that way I don’t mix it up for ya. That one is the FPF fault, so if you ever get an FPF fault, that is a motor overload fault. That basically means you have excessive load on your motor. Now there’s two ways to fix an overload fault, first of all you need to make sure your motor isn’t overloaded. So in other words, it didn’t lock up or your load got locked up. You also need to make sure your motor isn’t shorted, but uh, the other option is to actually go in and make sure your overload is set properly and that’s parameter 1, I don’t want to say the wrong one, I believe it’s 110, could be 108, don’t have them all memorized just yet, yeah parameter 108. So you want to make sure parameter 108 is set correctly. And again, that suggestion is actually in the motor overload recommend uh, in the remedy section of the motor overload fault.

Now the second most common fault I get, or I get people coming out with is the FHF, which is a High DC Bus fault. A High DC Bus is essentially, when your motor is running, it is a generator in the opposite direction. So, well I should say it this way, when your motor is running it can become a generator in the opposite direction if you stop too quickly. So if you’re running say 1700 rpm and you suddenly want to go down to 0 speed, when it goes from 1700 rpm down to 0 speed, all of that energy that is accumulated from the rotation of the motor and load has to go somewhere, so it gets pushed back up through the drive and it goes into the output of the drive and then it converts it into DC Bus voltage. And that DC Bus voltage, if it gets above a certain amount, depending on your drive’s voltage rating, will throw a DC Bus voltage fault. So the High DC Bus voltage fault means either you’re decelerating too quickly, maybe you’re accelerating too quickly. First possible solution is just to extend out your acceleration or deceleration times to make sure that that’s actually the root of the problem. The other problem, the other potential could be even though you’re stopping within your range you want to stop, you actually need to install a separate accessory called a dynamic braking kit. Now they do make dynamic braking kits specifically designed for the SMvector drive, it doesn’t have a built in brake chopper, but this kit is essentially designed to detect when that voltage comes back up through that line and it turns on and it actually pushes the DC Bus voltage out onto a resistor bank, which is part of the accessory. So that High DC Bus fault is either you have: you’re stopping too quickly or you need a dynamic braking accessory, that’s the number one cause of that one.

The other most common fault we occur may be just a standard, um motor output fault, or transistor fault. which is an FOF fault. This usually occurs, again, in conjunction with a motor overload, so the first fault we talked about, which was the FPF. Um, so what’ll happen is it’s either an overload issue or it could be that your motor is shorted on the output, so you might need to get your motor tested or the third possibility is your drive output has started to fail, so you can actually get what’s called an output transistor fault. So obviously the number one solution to that would be to disconnect your motor and try running your drive again. If it still gets the fault without a motor connected, then it’s probably in the drive. If that doesn’t fault it out then you wanna reconnect your motor, you can try running it again. If it happens again, then you probably want to get your motor tested to make sure that your motor isn’t shorted.

So those are the three most common faults that you’re gonna get when you’re actually dealing with the SMvector variable frequency drive. There’s a lot of other ones on here, such as the EPM programming module fault, which is this little program module, which can have issues, if you’re say transitioning from a newer model to an even older model. There’s uh, just a standard error message, that’s pretty common, just flashes ERR on the screen. And that’s if you are trying to issue a that you’ve locked out. So, for example, if I set my start/stop control from my keypad to my push buttons and I can’t start/stop from my keypad anymore, if I try to start and stop it will flash error, cause I turned off the ability. So I’m trying to issue a command that’s not allowed cause I’ve shut it off for some reason. So if you get the ERR, that’s just a programming error. Another real common one you’ll get is the, there’s one other one on here, a High Temperature fault and that’ll only occur if your environment isn’t conducive to whatever the operating temperatures are of the drive. And we’ve had this happen every once in a while where someone will actually stick a drive inside of panel and it’ll accumulate heat over time and once it gets above a certain temperature, it’ll actually trip on this FHF fault.

So for all the other faults and possible remedies, again check out the section 5 in the manual. There’s, there’s loads of feedback you can get here, check out the previous video that I went over, that actually talked about troubleshooting and looking at your outputs. That’s another great way to diagnose possible problems you may be experiencing. Or the third option is you give us a call, because our price, if you bought it off us, our price includes support, so we have a lot of real world application experience, we’ve been doing system integration and retrofits locally in a 300 mile radius for about 30 years. So there’s very few problems you may run into we haven’t, at least experienced, or ran into historically. We will be more than happy to go over those with you and help you resolve them.

Again thank you for stopping by, my name is Craig Chamberlin with Precision Electric, at precision-elec.com, your industrial drive, motor, and automation service center. If you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to call and we’ll see you then.