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Debate: Should you swap a whole controller board or just fix the bad relay? | Elevator Mechanics - Vivisector

Debate: Should you swap a whole controller board or just fix the bad relay?

I had a job last month on a 20-year-old Otis in an office tower downtown. The car kept stopping between floors with no error code. I spent 6 hours tracing wires before I found a single burned relay on the main board. My partner said I should have just swapped the whole controller board in 2 hours and moved on. But I spent $12 on a replacement relay and got it working. So which is better in the long run: quick swap and high cost, or slow fix and cheap? Has anyone else run into this debate on older units?

3 comments

3 Comments

garcia.jake6mo ago

Swapping the whole board just makes more sense when you factor in downtime and labor costs. That 2 hour swap versus 6 hours of troubleshooting means the building owner paid way more in lost elevator time and your hourly rate. Spending $12 on a relay is great on paper, but $12/hour is probably less than your real shop rate.

mason_reed476mo ago

Man the math only works if everything goes perfect and you don't hit any surprises. Like yeah 2 hours to swap a board sounds great until you realize the new board needs a firmware update nobody told you about or some dipstick wired the harness backwards 15 years ago and now your plug doesn't match. That 6 hours I spent tracing was basically my fault for trusting the prints but at least now I know that relay was the only thing wrong and the rest of the board is solid for another decade. Meanwhile your partner's swap job might be quick but the customer's gonna call back in 6 months when some other random failure pops up and you've got zero clue what's actually going on inside that black box. I'd rather fix what's broken and know the system than play parts cannon roulette with a whole board.

murray.robert6mo ago

Honestly, that "played parts cannon roulette with a whole board" line hits hard @mason_reed47. It's all fun and games until you got a swapped board that's got a different batch of caps or some tiny revision nobody catalogued, and then you're chasing ghosts in 6 months anyway. I'd rather burn time on one relay than keep going back to the same job because nobody bothered to understand what actually killed the first board.