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Spent $300 on a custom controller board that fried on day 3
I picked up a fancy aftermarket controller for an Otis lift in a 12-story building in Denver. Thought I was saving money over the OEM part, but it started throwing errors on startup by the second day. By day three, it completely smoked out and I had to pay a guy $200 in overtime to help me swap it back to the original. Has anyone else gotten burned by these third-party boards or am I just unlucky?
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wesley63911d ago
Got burned real bad by a third-party board for a Schindler MRL a few years back. Worked fine for about a week, then started dropping cars during heavy traffic. Took us three service calls and a lot of head scratching before we admitted the board was junk. The voltage regulator on it just couldn't handle the spikes from the main drive. Cost me more in lost business than just buying the OEM part would have. These knockoff boards are a gamble and most don't tell you the odds upfront.
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matthewking11d ago
Yeah that voltage regulator issue is exactly the kind of thing that slips through on these cheap boards. They test them in a clean shop environment and never account for the real world spikes that come from an aging main drive or a busy building. @wesley639 you're spot on about the hidden costs too, I know another guy who lost a whole weekend and had to refund a condo board because a third party controller locked up on a Friday night. The markup on OEM parts stings but the downtime from a failed knockoff stings way worse.
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michael80311d ago
Three service calls is exactly how it went for us too @wesley639, except we had a board from a different supplier that fried the entire CAN bus on a Saturday. Took a whole crew of three guys to replace every door controller in a 12-stop building because the knockoff sent a voltage spike back through the network. The OEM board might have cost $800 more but that Saturday callout plus parts came close to $4,000 and we still had to eat the cost of the board itself. These guys skip the transient protection to save 50 cents and leave us holding the bag.
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