Reliability
VFD Reliability Consulting
The drive keeps failing and nobody can tell you why.
That is where most calls start. I work the whole life of a drive, from the application before anything is bought, to the review while it runs, to the investigation and recovery when it goes down. The earlier you call, the cheaper the answer.
Sound familiar?
- The same fault comes back every time someone resets it.
- You replaced the drive and the new one died in the same spot.
- Motor bearings on a drive-fed motor are going years early.
- It only trips on certain loads, certain shifts, or certain weather.
Swapping parts treats the part. The cause is usually somewhere the new part does not fix.
Pick up wherever your drive is
Application and specification review
A check on the drive and motor selection and the sizing, against the real load and the data you have. We go through the installation and the choices that depend on site conditions, and the control requirements, and I can review your specification or write one from our discussion and the project documents.
Call when a new line, a retrofit, or a drive swap is on the drawing board.
Fleet reliability review
A review of the drives you already run, with maintenance recommendations for the existing fleet and a timeline for upgrades. If you are weighing an upgrade, I will look at the options, the proposals already on your desk, and the people offering to do the work. It can include small-group training out in the plant, on your own installations rather than in a classroom.
Call when the drives are running but you do not trust them, or an upgrade quote just landed.
Failure investigation
For the drive that keeps failing or tripping, and the fault that comes and goes and will not stay fixed. We get the line back up, then find out why it went down, so the next drive you install does not go down the same way.
Call when it failed again.
Rates
Published rates
The rates are published so you can budget before you call. Every job is quoted from them before any work starts, once I know the drives, the site, and what has already been tried. You see the number up front, and if the work turns up more than the quote covers, you hear about it before it gets billed.
I work in support of your engineers and project team, not as a professional engineer of record. If your plant needs an NDA before anyone looks at the drives, I can sign yours or send mine.
VFDs do not fail. Installations fail them.
A repeat failure is a mystery only until you look upstream of the part that broke. Most of the ones I get called for trace back to choices made on day 1: how the drive was sized for the load, how it was wired and grounded, and what got typed into it at first start.
Those choices are cheapest to fix before the install, cheaper during a review than after a failure, and most expensive the third time the line goes down. After 750+ commissioned drives, the patterns repeat from plant to plant.
When the cause turns out to be skills
Some findings are hardware. Others come down to a crew that was never shown how to read a fault log. Those go to on-site training, built around the drives you already own, with a scored before-and-after assessment on every class.
What failed, and how many times?
Send the drive brand and size, what it runs, and what has already been replaced. If you are still in the planning stage, send the motor nameplate and the load. You will have a reply within 1 business day.
Who shows up
Carl Lee Tolbert, PhD, CMRP. 30+ years in industrial automation, 750+ commissioned drives, and the author of Before the First Fault. I do not sell drives, so the answer is never to buy a new one from me. More about Carl.
Wayward Leaders® is a veteran-owned VFD training practice. We teach maintenance teams and plant electricians to install, commission, and troubleshoot variable frequency drives correctly, in person, at the plant that owns the equipment, anywhere in the United States.
Every class ends with a scored competency assessment. The plant gets a way to prove what each technician can do, not a roster of who sat in the room.
The instruction is field-trained. It is drawn from nearly 8,000 VFD, power, and motor documents and from more than 750 commissioned drives captured through personal field experience and data collection. Carl Lee Tolbert, PhD, CMRP, and ATD Master Trainer™, leads it. He has delivered more than 5,000 hours of VFD instruction across 30 years and trained 8,000 industrial professionals, from International Paper to the U.S. Navy.
The premise is simple: VFDs do not fail. Installations fail them. The curriculum is built backward from that.
Installation, commissioning, troubleshooting, and fault diagnosis guides are published openly at waywardleaders.com.