Industrial electronics, specifially temperature controls

[Dirtyd0g]

I need some help from someone good with industrial temperature control devices, the new temperature control units are not identical to the old ones. It looked easy enough but I have something wrong on the inputs.
Alan

[Paul408Notch]

I'm an electronics guy. Is this for the HVAC at your place or what?

[Dirtyd0g]

My clutch piston bonder, I think I got it, it appears to be heating. I had to get the secondary input connected correctly and the polarity of the thermocouples was crossed. Now I jsut need to figure out how to get all of the adjustments on the temperature control units right, familiar with the Omron e5cn units?
Alan

[Dirtyd0g]

It is now heating however the calibration just doesn't seem to be exactly right. I guess I need to go buy a temp gun to check and adjust it. The controller allows for you to adjust the base settings. I think the problem may be that I have 2 different brand thermocouples, but with the old controllers it wasn't a problem.
Alan

[Paul408Notch]

I've never worked on that particular unit as far as I remember, but usually there are only 2 adjustments on them. A zero and a range, or something similar. I don't know if the different brands would make a difference, unless the ranges are different on them.

[Dirtyd0g]

Well I have 2 identical heating plates with 2 thermocouples (supposed to be the same but the brand name is different) and 2 identical controllers. Both plates are set at 425, in minutes the lower plate is reading 300 and the other is reading 185. I can see one just oddly being a little faster to heat than the other but it seems excessive to me and I need to know that these thigns are running at the temperature they should be running at. I am going to go get a infrared temperature gun tomorrow and see if I can calibrate it in the adjustments of the controller. The previous controllers were minco (big $$$)
Alan

[Mista Bone]

Is there an adjustment to set the TC readings to ambient, aka calibrate it??

Old hot dog packing machines we had, you'd run 800-850 on the main heater for vacuum forming the film. With 13 elements you could get by if 4 burned out. When the 5th element when out you raised the temp until next break/lunch and maint. crew would swap in a new heater plate.

Only they wouldn't/couldn't calibrate it so you had to guess until you got into the range needed. Sometimes you'd be upwards of 1200 degrees. If range would be off the other way, things would get hot.

Or it would get stuck on and catch fire. Opps!

[Dirtyd0g]

It has been a long night of "I got it" then wait on it for a while and something just doesn't seem right. Then I remembered when I bought the first thermocouple for it I bought 2 just in case the other one went bad. So I pulled the spare out and looked up specs. It had 3 wires, the device had 3 terminals but one was tabbed do not use. The paperwork that came with the controller was about retarded so I went to the online catalog(actually both online catalogs the one from the thermocouple and the one from the controller) so in the end I learned I had to use the"do not use" terminal. Then the lower controller was dead on par with what it should be. Sounds great now I have to make the upper one work. Should be easy do the same thing right? No it turns out I still had the original thermocouple (platinum thermometer to be exact) in there and it calibrated completely different. Had to jumper it to fit the 3 wires and then recalibrate the controls for it. If I were a drinking man I'd probably go out for a 12 pack now, but hey it's 2:30 in the morning I can't even do that....On the bright side the machine does seem to be doing what it should (acts the way it always did before multiple controller and thermocouple failures) and I am comfortable with using it. ATI quoted me $3000 to repair it (when it was literally days out of warranty) plus I had to pay to ship it back to them on the east coast somewhere so I figure with 3 failure I just stressed out for 3 days about it and saved myself $9500
tomorrow I am going to get some temperature sticks to verify that it is on par with where it should be.
Alan

[Mista Bone]

Cliff notes, Alan needs more beer for his HAWT SHOP!

get surface Temp readings to be sure they are the same as before.