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Had a talk with an old timer that flipped my thinking on relay logic
Yesterday I was swapping out a controller in a 1978 Otis in a building on Main Street in Akron, and the building super, a guy named Frank who's been there since the 80s, said 'you kids just swap boards, you never fix the real problem.' He pointed out how the old relay systems taught you to trace each circuit one by one instead of guessing. Got me thinking, are we losing too much troubleshooting skill by just doing full replacements? Anyone else feel like we rely too much on swapping parts instead of fixing them?
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the_piper1mo ago
and Frank's not wrong about the tracing part, but I gotta push back a little on the "real problem" thing. Sometimes the real problem is a board that's been fried by a power surge or just plain worn out after 40 years, you know? I've spent hours chasing a bad solder joint on a relay board when swapping in a known good one would have saved the building a day of downtime. But he's absolutely right that starting with a multimeter and a schematic (if you can still find one) beats throwing parts at it blind.
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