So.... the new (identical model) VFD came in, I made a couple interesting discoveries, and came up with a few new questions....
Discovery #1: I currently have it wired exactly as before (I have the enclosure & filter, but I'm still waiting for a few parts to be delivered before I can put it all together), and found it interesting that, despite a several hour test run of the spindle, there were no noise problems whatsoever. I'm open to other explanations, but it certainly looks to me like the source of the problem was the old drive - not the wiring, shielding, not the BlackBox, PC, or other control electronics, and not any of the other environmental factors I'd speculated about.
Question #1: The one piece I don't have ordered yet is the breaker. I was looking at using
one of these with either
this breaker or
this one inside it. Your advice (using a breaker rated at 125% of the circuit) has me a little confused - it suggests I should go with the 20A unit... but doesn't hanging a 20A breaker off the end of a 15A circuit defeat the point of having it there? Or is there some situation where it's actually possible to blow the 20A before the 15A in the breaker box trips?
Discovery #2: I initially tried setting it up with your recommended params, and it didn't work. The spindle would slowly crawl up to around 4-500rpm, and then the VFD would throw an overload (AoL). I even tried it with
my old settings, which
also didn't work. What finally
did get it working was lowering the pd009 Intermediate Voltage. With pd009=13 it would start
very sluggishly, but eventually get up to speed (even worse than my prior drive, which was also pretty slow to get started ), and with pd009=12 it was nice and quick.
Questions #2 & 3:
2) This is several steps down from your recommended pd009=15 (which didn't work at all) - is this going to be a problem?
3) And why would this happen? Is there that much variation between production runs of the same model? Is the new drive somehow defective? Or is something else going on?
Any (more) input you can offer would be appreciated.
-Bats