Question:

What Do F1, F2, Or F3 Line Loss Faults Mean On The PF Soft Starter?

Answer:

These Are Pre-Start Faults

If these occur while the application is running, it would indicate that the control power could be momentarily dropping out and then doing a flying start. The pre-start fault would then be occurring during this re-start.

First, you would check to see if there was solid power to the application, and that all the connections were properly tightened down.

The next thing would be to see if there was any noise producers (like drives) on the line. This noise could cause the PF soft starter to think it sees a line problem and fault out. If the problem is intermittent, it could mean that the drives are not always on when the PF soft starter is being started. If possible, start the PF soft starter first, before the drive(s). This problem often occurs on morning start up or after lunch when a number of different applications are being started at the same time.

Putting an isolation transformer ahead of the PF soft starter would take care of the noise to the soft starter, but would not address the noise that could be affecting other parts of the application. In this case you could put line reactors (usually air core) ahead of the drives to keep them from back feeding the noise into other parts of the application.

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