Cooper Form 6 Control

[linehand]

Hope it's ok to drop names. We have only 3 Cooper f6 controllers in our system many older f4 f3 f3a and f5. My question is have any of you run into problems with the Cooper Form 6 controls. I have made plans to "upgrade" all of our controls to the f6. But meeting with an engineer with more years of experience than myself yesterday he suggested that they are junk and don't last. I haven't had any go bad in the last 7 years but just wanted a second, third opinion before I scrap the plan.
Thanks.

 

[dpc]

There have been some hardware issues with the earlier Form 6 controls - I believe it was related to the power supply section. We have had some clients who have problems with them. To say they are "junk" is not a fair statement, in my opinion. We have seen far more problems with the ABB recloser controls than the Form 6. Cooper also has a new Form 4D that I suspect will evolve into a replacement for the Form 6, but I'm just guessing. The biggest deficiency in the Form 4D is that is does not have waveform capture.

I'm not a particular fan of the Form 6, but I'd definitely recommend replacing the Form 3A and Form 5 units with something. The Form 3A is ancient and never very good to begin with and the Form 5 was much more troublesome than the Form 6 has been.

However, you may want to look at the offerings from SEL - SEL-351R, etc. The main issue with the SEL units is compatibility with the recloser itself, but they can tell what reclosers they can interface with. SEL customer service and support is superior to Cooper, IMO.

dpc

 

[Overvoltage]

Another vote for the SEL units. We just replaced a Form 5 with an SEL unit due to reliability concerns. I would suggest that if you're considering replacing all of the controls anyway, I would definitely see if SEL would work instead.

 

[dpc]

Also, as you are probably aware, Cooper Industries was recently purchased by Eaton, so there will likely be upcoming changes in local sales reps, support, etc. These changes are generally not for the better from an end-user perspective.