Random Communication Failure after Power Outage
Following a power outage we've been experiencing many intermittent communication errors at random intervals for our UPLC (H-class) PDA/TQD, running MassLynx. The following issues were observed;
- Communication can be lost by any or multiple modules at once. QSM, FTN, PDA, TQD.
- It does not matter what the instrument is doing at the time of the comms failure. It may be running a sample or it may be idle, there is always the risk of comms failing.
- The issue is temporarily fixed by resetting the comms to the affected module via the console. The instrument immediately recognises that the comms are fine and errors disappear.
- Performing a system reset (hard reset) seems to increase the time until the next comms failure (usually the next one occurs after 2 days).
Quite frustrating because the error is not reproducible. We have no problem getting the instrument to resume measuring after we've detected the errors, but we are losing a substantial amount of time due to runs being randomly interrupted. Has anyone experienced similar issues?
- Communication can be lost by any or multiple modules at once. QSM, FTN, PDA, TQD.
- It does not matter what the instrument is doing at the time of the comms failure. It may be running a sample or it may be idle, there is always the risk of comms failing.
- The issue is temporarily fixed by resetting the comms to the affected module via the console. The instrument immediately recognises that the comms are fine and errors disappear.
- Performing a system reset (hard reset) seems to increase the time until the next comms failure (usually the next one occurs after 2 days).
Quite frustrating because the error is not reproducible. We have no problem getting the instrument to resume measuring after we've detected the errors, but we are losing a substantial amount of time due to runs being randomly interrupted. Has anyone experienced similar issues?
0
Comments
-
Hi Matt. In my five years as custodian of 5 Waters LC instruments I have never had a power issue. In the last 6 months however I've had several power outages/surges that affected 4 of our instruments. It's odd, that all of them aren't affected at the same time. In two of the cases the sample manager power supply fried. The older models don't have the fuse protectors. Just today, we had another brown-out and now my elambda detector won't engage, even after replacing the fuses. The phone tech assist suggested I might need a new motherboard.
Sadly, none of this helps you directly other than to say I feel your pain. To prevent this in the future we're looking into getting a line filter to prevent surges (I hate UPS's).
Hope your systems are running better.0
