Within the first few days of arriving to a site, I was told about a job where their Overhead cranes had burnt out coils or contacts, on several of their hoists. On closer inspection, these were reversing contactors with dual coils. That was a first for me, I had never seen these before.
We could have replaced the single contactor with two modern reversing contactors – sure… but long term we were going to have some issues once we ran out of space.
Changing the box wasn’t an option either.
Luckily for us Schneider had a wonderful product, a reversing electronic motor starter, in a tiny package.
These things weren’t much bigger than an electronic timer and were rated large enough for the motor sizes we were using.
We removed all of the existing contactors from the only hoist that was fully operational, rewired and recommissioned. It worked perfectly.
All the existing contactors were used as spare parts to repair the remaining hoists, and we had a solid upgrade plan the next time it happened.
Paul Rickard 