That $350 controller board I gambled on for a old Otis

Picked up a used controller board off eBay for a 1992 Otis hydraulic last spring. Thought I was being smart, saving a few hundred bucks over a reman unit from the supply house. Spent like 4 hours rewiring and swapping it in on a Saturday, only to have the doors sequence go completely haywire on the first test run. Turns out the board had a firmware mismatch for the specific car number it came from. Bled almost 2 weeks chasing ghost errors before I gave up and bought the proper rebuilt board from Adams Elevator for $720. Now that one worked first try. Has anyone else been burned by used electronic parts that just look the same but aren't compatible?

2 comments

2 Comments

christopher9032d ago

Man that's rough. I got burned real bad last year on a used drive board for a MCE hydraulic controller. Looked identical, same part number stamped on it and everything. Hooked it up and the car just sat there with the main line contactor chattering like crazy for a solid 10 minutes before I killed the disconnect. Turned out it was programmed for a different voltage range on the motor field. Wasted a whole weekend and had to eat the $150 shipping to send it back to the seller who claimed it was "tested working." You really can't trust anything used unless you know the exact history of the unit it came out of.

jana_hill272d ago

Did you have to fight the seller for weeks to even get them to admit it was wrong?