I had some of those old Haughtons with the 24VDC locks. Every couple of months I was in the hatch cleaning door locks, and making sure they were perfect, after the mysterious, intermittant EME trips started happening. They were a real drag.

love smartrise. easy if you can read the prints

I don't want to sound like a hater but Smartrise is inferior to MCE. They use a Square D style chipset with a 7 year battery life. Find a car on fire service for no apparent reason... order a new board. The redundancy checks take forever and really affect the floor to floor times. When the 2004 code change began they had tons of software and code related issues resulting in a lot of failed inspections. We were doing all their R&D in the field. I remember the 24 volt door locks and I have seen the newer ones with 120 volt locks. They use very cheezy relays and you should keep some spares. I was ready to blow my brains out on the traction job we used their controller on with short floors. Had to convince the software engineer they needed a rear door zone mag. They swore they could do it with only the tape count and wanted me to keep tightening the brake to keep the car from sliding so far with a loss of power. Ultimately we installed a rear door zone mag. I think Smartrise makes a decent 😉 hydraulic product but I will keep my distance.

Smartrise no longer uses the relay boards for their locks they have upgraded to a solid state board instead. Much longer life expectancy. I also know that they can set your slide distance for the power loss you experienced in there parameters, not sure why they had you tightening your brake

I've only taken part in the installation of one controller, and I found it...interesting. The controller itself is pretty much one board, which is awesome as far as fewer pieces to break goes. But when the board goes, you can't just swap it, you've got to get a new one.

I did a two stop traction, and the access and fire keys were all networked to the controller with CAT-5, which was kind of cool.

I didn't care for the prints though. Why deviate from the norm? It makes no sense.

I love the smartrise , traction or hidro, no problem.

As a previous poster said, you need an engineering degree to follow the prints. Their customer service is top notch , but if they had a traditional print I would not need to call them as often.

The prints are a little different from most but with a little help they are more than easy to read

My only problem with smartrise is with brown outs, we service several on an area of town that has bad power and you got random faults of the car being lost, I think they sell an upgrade because I priced one out recently and there was a line item on the estimate from them thay said brown out protection, also the new ones we've installed don't have that problem but earlier versions must...

That issue wouldn't be controller related. If in fact brownouts are occurring the system (and many other control systems) would most likely be getting an under voltage fault. Typically the frequency drive (Magnitech) will pick up that power loss and record it as an under voltage fault. However, those same under voltage issues could be simply an individual building issue and not necessarily a grid problem. Loosing 10% of your power, or more, for more than a minute is technically a brownout. Though these issues can be directly related to the building and or installation. Things to look for would be the mainline wire's capacity and the length of that run, other equipment sharing the same power, and believe it or not loose connections. What's more if the building has poor power and everyone turns their AC on during a hot day, the voltage can drop and cause a bottle neck at the transformer restricting the elevators needed power.

Moving forward, I realize i'm rambling here although, I do want to share another possibility that could be causing your control issues. Due to the fact SmartRise controllers are entirely serial link, they are also very sensitive to harmonics or electrical noise. Check all connection, add/replace shielding or shielded wires and be sure every piece of equipment is grounded.

I've installed many of these controllers and have found verifying all of the above typically results in the problems being found.

Good luck hope you find the issue.

they uses an ungrounded system like westinghouse did. they want to isolate the 24v circuits from earth ground because of possible induced voltage into the circuit. If you have C24, M24, or H24 going to earth ground the elevator could possibly move on its own while you have control of it on car top or hoistway inspection. It won't pop the breakers because REF on the power supply isn't grounded to earth ground BE CAREFUL

we installed 3 traction cars a couple of years ago. the mechanic left the car on cartop for the night while doing the mod, the next day he came and the car had moved from where he left it, a couple of floors. he thought it was strange but all seemed ok, so he moved on. a while later, same thing. he was on the car when it moved by itself. very dangerous. so he continued the mod and always pulled stop switch. smartrise told him to recheck all wiring, but he found nothing wrong. any way he finished car and moved to next car. sure enough he was getting the same thing. now we knew it was not a fluke. I believe the it was induced voltages from the trail cable. you could see some of the input led on lightly. any way smartrise came out and installed relays in the inspection circuit. and it solved the problem. the cars have ran great for the last 2 years, rarely a call.

I have looked at the engineering degree to read the drawings Donlin, you just need common sense. Very easy to follow through if you know what you are doing..... I have been using them for the last 5 years, and I would never go back to GAL, or MCE.

We are having the same issue with their latest traction controller which is called C4., I saw it was mentioned by someone else also in this forum!
The car moved on its own when we were working on the car. There is a serious problem with their brake boards and the whole logic we believe. They were not able to solve the issue yet, and it is extremely dangerous. We are thinking of changing the controller and switching to another vendor.

I personally have installed a ton of Virginia controls over the years, as far as hydros, in my opinion they are the best. I have a bunch of unreliable smartrise hydros on my route. I take care of many different types of controls. I have one hospital with smartise cars with gearless Torin machines. I have another hospital with MCE iBox's with gearless Torin machines. Identical cars, both have GAL movfr operators. In my opinion there is no comparison. The MCEs are light-years ahead of smartrise. So much better ride, much better reliability. Not just the hospitals, I have a bunch of smartrise cars in random buildings.

Smartrise was not created to make the most reliable, best performing controller out there. They were created so a man could get rich taking a portion of the market selling controllers to small independent companies, following the trend of making the install so simple a monkey could do it.

I think their selectors/tapes are junk. The lock board issues are embarrassing. It's caused so many callbacks its ridiculous, everytime though smartrise makes money selling another part. They came out with an updated lockboard to reduce the issues. I have a better idea, install a better designed controller without completely unnecessary redundant failure points designed right into the controller. That board shouldn't even be there. Another example, the B2 contactor for the brake on smartrise, 3 pole standard contactor. It opens/closes 1 wire. They wired all three contacts in series so any one contact not making well causes issues, Instead of wiring the three poles In parallel so all three would have to fail to cause an issue (meaning way more reliable).

Loose fuses in holders on SRU boards. SRU boards randomly going bad. Car loosing memory of where the imaginary magnets are causing callbacks, long lag times between placing a call and waiting for the controller to process everything and move the car. I wish I could go to some of my jobs right now and look through my log books, I know I'm forgetting more stuff.

I have found the cars I have that have the least reliable controls are Ecospaces, followed by smartrises. The most reliable are the va controls, mce iboxs , etc. Other guys in my company and guys I know at other local companies have similar track records of what's reliable and what's not.