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.