Vent: Wasted $400 on a controller board that didn't match my cab

Last month I ordered a new controller board for an Otis elevator in a downtown Austin building. Spent $400 on it based on the serial number on the old board. Got it in, pulled the old one, and the connector pinout was totally different. Wasted a whole afternoon swapping it out before I realized the cab had a retrofit years back that changed the board generation. Anyone else run into mismatched parts from older retrofits?

2 comments

2 Comments

abbyg6014d ago

Oh boy, I feel your pain. It's like these elevators have their own secret histories that nobody bothers to write down. I once spent a whole weekend chasing a phantom ground fault on a controller that turned out to be from a different model year than the building's records showed. You think you're being smart by matching serial numbers, but then the retrofit gremlins come out to play. At least you only wasted one afternoon, I had to cancel a whole family trip to sort out that mess. Hope you can send the board back or at least use it for parts on another job.

dakota_patel9814d ago

Boy howdy, you hit the nail on the head about those retrofit gremlins. What gets me is that nobody ever thinks to check if the previous repair crew swapped out the main processor years ago without updating the building docs. That one missing paper trail can cost you a whole day and a lot of frustration before you even figure out what's going on.