Drives need love too. And this is enough to bring tears to a variable speed drive engineer's eyes...
This is why drives need routine maintenance and servicing. Something as simple and inexpensive as a filter can, if not regularly replaced, lead to an ingress of dust and oil..which in turn reduces airflow and increases temperature... which leads to a shorter life for your inverter.
Smaller drives, operating in clean environments, are often thought of as plug and play. And in a pristine environment a new drive (operating within its parameters) should offer trouble-free running. Its fans and filters will still need replacing, but an unstressed drive in an unpolluted environment will happily tick over with a brief annual service. And if your drives are lucky enough to operate in these conditions, then two decades of service is not an unusual life-span for them.
However...if your drive powers on through conditions which are not always optimal, where the atmosphere is dusty, or corrosive or the ambient temperature is higher than ideal, then drive servicing takes on a new and very important dimension.
Proper servicing not only extends the life of your drive, it will save you costly repairs on preventable failures.
Above is an example of just how contaminated drives can become if something as basic and inexpensive as filters are not maintained. Our EDC North East engineers were called in to service these ABB drives, which were valiantly battling to perform, despite the adverse conditions.