If you’ve had a long career in manufacturing, chances are good you’ve worked with a Reliance component at some point during that time. Reliance Electric has been producing variable speed motors since the early 1900s. Since then they’ve expanded product lines, consolidated and merged with other companies while sometimes selling off some product lines. This explains why Reliance parts can now sometimes be found listed under other company names like Baldor-Reliance or Asea Brown Boveri.
To make all of this name changing more confusing, Reliance was--for a short period of time--a subsidiary of Exxon Corporation. This happened in 1979. But Reliance returned to private ownership in 1986 and began publicly trading stock again in 1992. Then the company was bought through a hostile takeover through stock purchase by Rockwell Automation in 1994. In 1998, Rockwell chose to move Reliance’s headquarters from Cleveland to Greenville, South Carolina where it became part of Rockwell Automation’s larger global company.
Many of Reliance Electric’s components are now in legacy status and cannot be purchased directly from the OEM, regardless of name. Luckily that’s where our company comes in. We have a number of Reliance Electric Motors in stock and available for shipment.
If you need a Reliance AC VS drive, please talk to our staff about that option, too. Reliance Electric offers a number of different AC VS drives, including the company’s GP-1200 series, the GP-2000 series, the GV3000 series, and the SP500 series. Each of these drives has specific advantages. Many can be used with remote or local control. But sometimes it’s difficult to know how to change your drive from one state to the other. Here are some tips for some of Reliance’s more popular series.
How to Change a Reliance Electric SP500 Drive from Local to Remote Control
Parameter settings can be found in the SP500 AC Drive Installation and Operation Manual. When the drive is set to parameter range 0, which is the default setting, it will be under local control from the keypad. Change the parameter range to 1 if you want control signals from the terminal strip and speed reference from the analog input. Change the parameter range to 2 if you want control signals from the terminal strip and speed reference from the keypad. Change the parameter settings to 3 if you want control signals from the terminal strip with multi-speed presets from the terminal strip.