Johnson Controls/Vacon/Danfoss

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vinnygalbo

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I've installed & programmed several Johnson Controls VFDs. I recently came across a Vacon brand VFD.

http://www.clrwtr.com/PDF/Vacon/Vacon-X-Drives.pdf

When I needed some tech support I somehow ended up with Danfoss. It looks like Danfoss owns Vacon brand now. I was curious to find out who actually makes these.

Even though these are 3 different brands of drives the programming interface is very similar.
 
vinnygalbo said:
I've installed & programmed several Johnson Controls VFDs. I recently came across a Vacon brand VFD.

http://www.clrwtr.com/PDF/Vacon/Vacon-X-Drives.pdf

When I needed some tech support I somehow ended up with Danfoss. It looks like Danfoss owns Vacon brand now. I was curious to find out who actually makes these.

Even though these are 3 different brands of drives the programming interface is very similar.
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Those drives are originally Vacon drives brand labeled to Johnson Controls. Vacon was a Finnish company that sold their drives only through Cutler Hammer in the US for years. When that agreement expired, Vacon bought another US drives mfr. called TB Woods to get their distribution channel and opened a US facility in Milwaukee. But Vacon was not very big in the overall VFD market. Danfoss is huge Dutch company that had their own line of drives for years (along with controls, contactors, relays etc.), then bought another older US based HVAC drives company called Graham in Milwaukee years ago to establish themselves here. Danfoss recently joined with Vacon and although it was purported to be a "merger", we all know who was the "top" and who was the "bottom" in that transaction; Danfoss cut the checl for around 1 billion Euros to Vacon shareholders. So they are now all Danfoss, but Vacon has, for the time being, retained it's separate name and product lines. World-wide, Danfoss was maybe #6 in the drives market and Vacon was maybe #10, but merged, they are now #4 (don't quote me on those exact numbers, I'm using them to make a point as to why they merged. Market position when going after bid world wide OEMs that use VFDs is important, because it makes the OEMs comfy about being able to get support anywhere. Here in the US, even combined they are still way down the ladder.
 
Yes there can be a difference because when you sell one drive for a 37,500HP motor as part of a steel rolling mill, that is a lot of $$ but only one unit!

In the US, by $$, I think it is still Siemens, ABB, Rockwell, because Siemens and ABB are big into the coordinated drive business that uses huge multi motor drive systems for things like paper machines, steel mills and container crane systems, Rockwell only recently gained the ability to start chasing those, so it's all up hill for them. But by units in North America, it is Rockwell, ABB, Siemens as a whole. If you break it down into "Classes" of drives (Component class, standard class, advanced class, large low voltage class, Medium Voltage drives etc.), it swaps back and forth between those, with Schneider slipping in and out of the top three in some sizes. This is from a report I saw from 2015, so it may have changed since then.

World wide, it's Siemens, ABB, Schneider and now Danfoss as #4, supplanting Mitsubishi in that position after the merger. Worldwide, Rockwell is further down the list because it's pretty difficult to sell a drive designed for the US market to customers in Europe for a non-European company or in Asia for a non-Asian company.
 
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