VFD and Motor Control Installation

A properly installed drive runs quiet for years; a rushed one trips every shift.

VFD supply, install, and programming

We supply, install, and program drives from the four families most Maritime plants already run: Allen-Bradley PowerFlex, ABB, Danfoss, and Schneider Altivar. Sizing comes first. Motor FLA, load type, duty cycle, and cable run length decide the drive, not the catalogue page.

Installation is done by Red Seal industrial electricians. Programming covers the parameters that actually matter on site:

Motor nameplate data and autotune, so current limits protect the motor instead of guessing
Accel and decel ramps matched to the load, with braking options where decel trips are likely
V/Hz or sensorless vector control depending on the application
PID loops for pressure, flow, and level on pump and fan duty
Network setup over EtherNet/IP, Modbus TCP, or PROFINET, tied into your PLC

Because we program Allen-Bradley, Schneider, Omron, Phoenix Contact, and Unitronics PLCs in house, the drive and the logic get commissioned by the same people. You get a parameter backup file when we leave, not a business card.

MCC installation and bucket retrofits

We handle MCC work at both scales: new sections and line-up extensions, and the more common job, swapping an across-the-line starter bucket for a VFD or soft starter bucket while the rest of the MCC keeps running.

Our panel shop builds and tests retrofit buckets before they go to site. That matters because the shutdown window is the expensive part. The bucket arrives wired, labelled, and point-checked, so site time goes to mechanical fit, terminations, and commissioning instead of assembly.

Every retrofit is checked against the Canadian Electrical Code, and we document what changed: single-lines updated, bucket schedules revised, and arc flash labelling flagged for review when the fault path changes.

Why VFD installs fail

Most VFD problems that get blamed on the drive were built in on installation day. Three failure modes come up again and again:

Cable routing. Motor leads carry fast-switching PWM voltage. Run them in the same tray as analog signals or encoder wiring and you get noise faults no parameter change will fix. Motor cables need separation, shielded VFD-rated cable, and a 360 degree shield termination.
Grounding. A drive without a low-impedance ground path pushes common mode current through whatever is available, often the motor bearings. The result is bearing fluting and a motor failure months later that nobody connects back to the install.
Harmonics and reflected wave. Drives distort supply current. On a weak feed, or with many drives on one bus, that means overheated transformers and nuisance trips elsewhere in the plant. Long motor runs add reflected wave voltage spikes at the motor terminals. Line reactors, DC chokes, dv/dt filters, and sine filters exist for exactly these problems, and they have to be selected, not guessed. IEEE 519 gives the distortion limits worth designing to.

An engineering-led install deals with all of this before energization. That is cheaper than diagnosing it afterward, one trip at a time.

Energy savings on fans and pumps

Fans and pumps follow the affinity laws: flow tracks speed, but power tracks the cube of speed. Slow a fan to 80 percent and input power drops to roughly half. If your process throttles flow with dampers or valves while the motor runs flat out, a drive converts that wasted head directly into energy savings.

The strongest candidates are variable torque loads with long run hours: HVAC and process fans, cooling water and glycol pumps, refrigeration condenser fans, aeration blowers. Constant torque loads like conveyors save less, and we will say so rather than sell you a drive that will not pay back.

Utilities in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and PEI run efficiency programs that often include incentives for VFD retrofits on fan and pump loads. Program terms change, so confirm current details with your utility. We supply the motor data, run hours, and load information the applications ask for as part of the job.

Emergency drive swaps across the Maritimes

the Maritimes is a bad place to depend on a far away integrator. A failed compressor drive in a seafood plant is product warming in the blast freezer. A dead fan drive in a sawmill kiln is a charge ruined. Distance is part of the failure cost here, and plants in Truro or Charlottetown know what waiting on someone from Ontario looks like.

Bedford Industrial Automation is based in Dieppe NB and works across Halifax, Truro, Amherst, Moncton, Saint John, and Charlottetown. When a drive dies, call our emergency line and a real person will answer: 1-833-423-3367.

Emergency swaps are rarely like for like. The failed model is obsolete, or the replacement available is a different brand. That means translating parameters, not copying them: motor data, ramps, I/O mapping, and the fieldbus configuration your PLC expects. Our electricians and programmers handle both halves of that job, so the swap ends as a running machine, not a mounted drive waiting on a second contractor.

One team from audit to support

Multi-line plants accumulate drives the way toolboxes accumulate adapters: one brand per project, per contractor, per decade. The cost shows up as a shelf of mismatched spares, parameter files nobody can find, and electricians fluent in one drive family but not the other four.

A drive standardization audit puts numbers on that. We inventory every drive by brand, model, firmware, and application, flag obsolete units that are getting hard to source, and recommend a standard family per duty so spares, backups, and training cover more of the plant.

This is where one team matters for drives specifically. Bedford is engineering-led, with a B.Eng on staff, an in-house panel shop, Red Seal industrial electricians, and programmers across five PLC platforms. Design, panels, code, install, and support come from one shop, so the drive schedule, the bucket build, the parameter set, and the PLC integration are not four companies pointing at each other.

Send the motor list. Get a VFD quote and see what the job actually costs before deciding anything.

Straight answers

Common questions

How much does VFD installation cost?It depends on horsepower, voltage, cable run length, and how much programming and integration the application needs. A small fan drive on a short run is a different job from a 200 hp compressor retrofit with filters and a bypass. A site walk, or even a photo of the motor nameplate and the existing starter, gets you a real number instead of a range.

Can I add a VFD to my existing motor?Usually, but check the motor first. Older motors without inverter-duty insulation can suffer winding stress from a drive’s fast voltage edges, especially on long cable runs. Inverter-duty motors built to NEMA MG1 Part 31 handle this by design. Where the existing motor stays, a dv/dt filter or a shorter cable route often solves the problem.

Why does my VFD keep tripping?Repeat trips usually trace to setup or wiring, not a defective drive. Overcurrent trips point to wrong motor data or accel ramps, overvoltage on stopping points to decel set faster than the load can shed energy, and ground faults often mean damaged motor cable. The drive’s fault history is the first thing to read, because it timestamps the story.

Do VFDs actually save energy?On fans and pumps, yes, because power drops with the cube of speed, so modest speed reductions produce large savings. On constant torque loads like conveyors and mixers the savings are smaller, and the case for a drive is usually control and soft starting rather than energy. Any honest assessment starts with your load profile and run hours.

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Get a VFD quote

Send a motor list or a nameplate photo and we will price the job, free, with no follow-up pressure.

Get a VFD quote 1-833-423-3367