Smart Rise Controllers

What do you guys think of the Smart Rise controllers? We've installed quite a few of these. Has anyone had any good or bad experiences with this equipment that they would like to share?

I've only seen one, thought it was pretty slick.

Howz the price, compared to MCE's M2000?

The pricing is competitive to the MCE M2000 controller. I think in some cases the Smart Rise is a little cheaper. I do like the customer service at Smart Rise better than Motion. It doesn't take 45 minutes to talk to someone. So far, the Smart Rise have been very easy to install and once adjusted they run great with no issues. I was just curious what other mechanics thought of this equipment.

I've run across several units but have no experience with them. However I did price them several times and found them to not be competitive. When we priced them 3-5 years ago it was against MCE, EC, GAL and Virgina. I'm glad to here you say they have been competitive. I will give them another chance.

I may come across as a salesman for them. That is the ONLY controller we will install. It is such a smooth ride on the hydro's. We are putting in the first traction this year with the smartrise, don't have any experience with the traction yet. On the spot with their delivery times and great after the sale support. What an easy product to install, adjust, and change parameters. The price has always been cheaper to me. When you add in the fact that you use less wires and smaller duct, to us it has been an easy choice.

Solidstate, wich area have you inslated the smartrise ? CA ? or other state ?

Smartrise has 24 volt door locks. Make sure you Clean them every month. I like everything when it runs.

24 volts? Not so "smart".

I've never installed one with 24 volt door locks. All of them have been 120 VAC. Were they using 24 volts in the early versions?

Maybe, we just had a new one installed I will check it out maybe they learned from their mistakes. I wish I would do the same.

24 volt door locks were the earlier version. They now come with 120v. They offer an upgrade kit for around $300 to convert the older models to the higher voltage locks. They also sell a snubber kit to eliminate the communication fault caused by the arc when the main and brake contactor drop.

I've installed 6 Smartrise controllers in the last 2 years and they are by far my favorite. Their customer support is great also! Just out of curiosity, why would you consider the 24V interlocks to be troublesome? Provided the interlocks have proper contact swipe, I can't see how this would present any issues.

Might be ok in most applications.
But sometimes, you can have a really long run back to the controller, and experience some voltage drop, (maybe some induced noise incidently), and if there are any tarnished connections, or grit and grime on the interlocks, bang, there you go, a shutdown. Evidently, it happened enough to where SmartRise thought best to change it.

Years ago, Schindler had low voltage locks, and they too later thought better of it, and switched to higher voltage. That seems to be the consensus here. But you're not wrong in thinking that, in good conditions, 24 volts is ok. I agree.

Troubleshooting Smartrise is a horror when the problem is not your typical door lock or gate switch failure. Take a look at the prints, the information given is very vague. They give you point to point of the main circuits but nothing else. I agree when they run they run smooth and tuning them up is fairly easy but when problems arise they are not your easy to find like your typical MCE. All 3 SRU boards are interchangeable but you need to download the program into each board before use.

One Armor job here has 240 volts on the locks and car gate, in the last 8 years we haven't had one door lock problem.

I had some of those old Haughtons with the 24VDC locks. Every couple of months I was in the hatch cleaning door locks, and making sure they were perfect, after the mysterious, intermittant EME trips started happening. They were a real drag.

love smartrise. easy if you can read the prints

I don't want to sound like a hater but Smartrise is inferior to MCE. They use a Square D style chipset with a 7 year battery life. Find a car on fire service for no apparent reason... order a new board. The redundancy checks take forever and really affect the floor to floor times. When the 2004 code change began they had tons of software and code related issues resulting in a lot of failed inspections. We were doing all their R&D in the field. I remember the 24 volt door locks and I have seen the newer ones with 120 volt locks. They use very cheezy relays and you should keep some spares. I was ready to blow my brains out on the traction job we used their controller on with short floors. Had to convince the software engineer they needed a rear door zone mag. They swore they could do it with only the tape count and wanted me to keep tightening the brake to keep the car from sliding so far with a loss of power. Ultimately we installed a rear door zone mag. I think Smartrise makes a decent hydraulic product but I will keep my distance.

Smartrise no longer uses the relay boards for their locks they have upgraded to a solid state board instead. Much longer life expectancy. I also know that they can set your slide distance for the power loss you experienced in there parameters, not sure why they had you tightening your brake

I've only taken part in the installation of one controller, and I found it...interesting. The controller itself is pretty much one board, which is awesome as far as fewer pieces to break goes. But when the board goes, you can't just swap it, you've got to get a new one.

I did a two stop traction, and the access and fire keys were all networked to the controller with CAT-5, which was kind of cool.

I didn't care for the prints though. Why deviate from the norm? It makes no sense.

I love the smartrise , traction or hidro, no problem.

As a previous poster said, you need an engineering degree to follow the prints. Their customer service is top notch , but if they had a traditional print I would not need to call them as often.

The prints are a little different from most but with a little help they are more than easy to read

My only problem with smartrise is with brown outs, we service several on an area of town that has bad power and you got random faults of the car being lost, I think they sell an upgrade because I priced one out recently and there was a line item on the estimate from them thay said brown out protection, also the new ones we've installed don't have that problem but earlier versions must...

That issue wouldn't be controller related. If in fact brownouts are occurring the system (and many other control systems) would most likely be getting an under voltage fault. Typically the frequency drive (Magnitech) will pick up that power loss and record it as an under voltage fault. However, those same under voltage issues could be simply an individual building issue and not necessarily a grid problem. Loosing 10% of your power, or more, for more than a minute is technically a brownout. Though these issues can be directly related to the building and or installation. Things to look for would be the mainline wire's capacity and the length of that run, other equipment sharing the same power, and believe it or not loose connections. What's more if the building has poor power and everyone turns their AC on during a hot day, the voltage can drop and cause a bottle neck at the transformer restricting the elevators needed power.

Moving forward, I realize i'm rambling here although, I do want to share another possibility that could be causing your control issues. Due to the fact SmartRise controllers are entirely serial link, they are also very sensitive to harmonics or electrical noise. Check all connection, add/replace shielding or shielded wires and be sure every piece of equipment is grounded.

I've installed many of these controllers and have found verifying all of the above typically results in the problems being found.

Good luck hope you find the issue.

they uses an ungrounded system like westinghouse did. they want to isolate the 24v circuits from earth ground because of possible induced voltage into the circuit. If you have C24, M24, or H24 going to earth ground the elevator could possibly move on its own while you have control of it on car top or hoistway inspection. It won't pop the breakers because REF on the power supply isn't grounded to earth ground BE CAREFUL

we installed 3 traction cars a couple of years ago. the mechanic left the car on cartop for the night while doing the mod, the next day he came and the car had moved from where he left it, a couple of floors. he thought it was strange but all seemed ok, so he moved on. a while later, same thing. he was on the car when it moved by itself. very dangerous. so he continued the mod and always pulled stop switch. smartrise told him to recheck all wiring, but he found nothing wrong. any way he finished car and moved to next car. sure enough he was getting the same thing. now we knew it was not a fluke. I believe the it was induced voltages from the trail cable. you could see some of the input led on lightly. any way smartrise came out and installed relays in the inspection circuit. and it solved the problem. the cars have ran great for the last 2 years, rarely a call.

I have looked at the engineering degree to read the drawings Donlin, you just need common sense. Very easy to follow through if you know what you are doing..... I have been using them for the last 5 years, and I would never go back to GAL, or MCE.

We are having the same issue with their latest traction controller which is called C4., I saw it was mentioned by someone else also in this forum!
The car moved on its own when we were working on the car. There is a serious problem with their brake boards and the whole logic we believe. They were not able to solve the issue yet, and it is extremely dangerous. We are thinking of changing the controller and switching to another vendor.

I personally have installed a ton of Virginia controls over the years, as far as hydros, in my opinion they are the best. I have a bunch of unreliable smartrise hydros on my route. I take care of many different types of controls. I have one hospital with smartise cars with gearless Torin machines. I have another hospital with MCE iBox's with gearless Torin machines. Identical cars, both have GAL movfr operators. In my opinion there is no comparison. The MCEs are light-years ahead of smartrise. So much better ride, much better reliability. Not just the hospitals, I have a bunch of smartrise cars in random buildings.

Smartrise was not created to make the most reliable, best performing controller out there. They were created so a man could get rich taking a portion of the market selling controllers to small independent companies, following the trend of making the install so simple a monkey could do it.

I think their selectors/tapes are junk. The lock board issues are embarrassing. It's caused so many callbacks its ridiculous, everytime though smartrise makes money selling another part. They came out with an updated lockboard to reduce the issues. I have a better idea, install a better designed controller without completely unnecessary redundant failure points designed right into the controller. That board shouldn't even be there. Another example, the B2 contactor for the brake on smartrise, 3 pole standard contactor. It opens/closes 1 wire. They wired all three contacts in series so any one contact not making well causes issues, Instead of wiring the three poles In parallel so all three would have to fail to cause an issue (meaning way more reliable).

Loose fuses in holders on SRU boards. SRU boards randomly going bad. Car loosing memory of where the imaginary magnets are causing callbacks, long lag times between placing a call and waiting for the controller to process everything and move the car. I wish I could go to some of my jobs right now and look through my log books, I know I'm forgetting more stuff.

I have found the cars I have that have the least reliable controls are Ecospaces, followed by smartrises. The most reliable are the va controls, mce iboxs , etc. Other guys in my company and guys I know at other local companies have similar track records of what's reliable and what's not.

I realize I sound a bit harsh towards smartrise. To be fair they do run, most of them I'm not at fixing each week , but they do have far more issues than most of the rest of the controls on my route. However most of what said is well deserved I think by their not so smart engineering and design decisions.

And I do like the debug screen you can place calls with real quick and can see where the car is/car speed. It's not all bad. But I don't think the couple nice bells and whistles with smartrise are enough to outweigh the negative.

Does anyone else have fun with their force guided relays for sf1 and sf2 that like to burn up contacts? That you have to order from smartrise...

When I work with the sales folks in my office to get quotes out, anything critical or important I'm always sure to spec a MCE ibox or va controls mh3000.

Yep, those two relays fail all the time! You can see spark inside them when the contactors pick or releases. Definitely a design issue.
No need to mention all the 120volt inputs. They also fail all the time causing to get redundancy error, which requires changing the main board and re-learning the shaft which is a pain. I hate seeing “syncing” message and all the delays for doing a simple task. it seems like they also know about all these issues and instead of solving the problem they have chosen to increase the warranty period to 5 years! I am not a fan of that.
I agree with you about Virginia Controls and MCE. Those are my favorite controllers too.

I don't like them for 2 major reasons.

1st is software. IF you have software issues getting it resolved can be difficult and time consuming. However, when corrected it will most likely be good until you do something like Door Lock Monitoring and smartrise never updated the files, so you need to start all over with the "bugs" in the software.

2nd tech support. They are the worst for tech support. I filed a complaint with the BBB because they told me if you don't buy "X" amount of controllers from them a year you get moved to the back of the que. Waiting hours for the "call back" that normally comes super late in NYC like 7pm. This results in overtime charges for the customer and many hours of useless billing for the customer. Tech support just reads from a screen and have little knowledge of elevators so sooner or later they will tell you "We need a senior tech" and now you go back into the que waiting hours (again) for a call back. I now record the conversations with the Tech Support and make them send an email to keep a paper trail. If anyone wants to see the weeks of emails for this project we have in NY where the problem was software and they couldn't figure it out for literally 2 weeks (10 days half that was waiting for call backs) at what point they sent us new software but was never updated with all the changes made for floor lock outs, floors taken out of service, parking, PI changes. I sent them the job download and they still couldn't update.


My preference is MCE or ESI. If you call tech support, they are calling you back within an hour (usually). The prints have 90% of the information needed to fix almost all the elevators but yes sometimes you need to call tech support. Both of these companies have the software down to a science, so you don't need to worry about that. I also like them because they are more mechanical with relays and are safer.

This is my opinion.

I've heard they are going out of business. Not sure how true it is, but its not surprising with so many bad reviews and terrible products and services.