Home Forums General Discussion Technical Questions 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.