Another VFD Source

Found this place surfing. Spoke with the fellow who was helpful in basic information and tried to track down a VFD for me. No luck on that score, though. Did place a free WTB ad on his "Surplus ADs" board. Some neat links on his site for vacuum tubes and other stuff.

Duh - forgot the link:

http://www.drivesys.com/

FWIW

[This message has been edited by Dave Milosevich (edited 07-02-2002).]

Try http://www.dealerselectric.com/ They usually have a good selection at good price.

Thanks, Ron. Been there. It seems that finding a vendor that can state with some assurance that a particular VFD will work with single phase input on a 7.5 HP, three phase motor, is difficult. Thought I had it nailed when I found a Hitachi 15 HP drive. But the people there said "no, it's not designed for operation with a missing (input) phase." It seems that most maufacturers make VFDs that will happily work on single phase input power up to 3HP. After that it depends on having a VFD that is rated at some percentage above the load and be programmable to not trip off in the absence of one of the input phases. In the case of the 15HP VFD above, I went to the Hitachi site and looked at the manual. Forrest is correct when he says that these manuals from reputable manufacturers are fine examples of technical writing. This particular manual is about 250+ pages of fine techincal writing and digging through it with Adobe made it difficult to find the part about disabling the trip-off on a low or missing input phase. It is probably in there somewhere but I just do not have the time right now. Not ranting here, just coming to the realization that this is a serious endeavor that will require more time than I initially thought. Again, Forrest was correct when he cautioned us that one has to do real research and understand what is involved. For us home-shop guys, up to 3HP VFDs (of the current generation) appear to be pretty much plug-n-play. The further beyond that one goes requires proportionally greater knowledge and understanding. My VFD is on hold until I get smarter. That may be awhile.