s811 Eaton Soft Start

That information is the specifications section of the manual under the heading MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures). Third listing down is the manual from Eaton.

You will have to talk to Eaton about this (if the information available in the manual, datasheets, etc does not have it), they should be able to advise you.

From my experience you are lucky, but most likely because your duty cycle is very very low.

They have no heat sinks to speak of for the SCRs, they just clamp them in the bus bars. I found, after hooking one up to a scope, that if you set the ramp time for maximum 45 seconds and connect to a heavy load (mine was a rock crusher), the light on the front will blink once per second, 45 times, telling you that it is "ramping". But at 17 seconds, the integral bypass contacts had already closed because the SCRs were over heating already. The starter has a thermal sensor that will override the ramp settings to try to save them by going across-the-line early.

The trick they use is that the bypass contactors (separate for each pole) use the old Westinghouse "Advantage" solid state DC ramped coil control , so the contacts close very very quietly and people don't realize it has happened. But it is no longer ramping and if the motor was not at >80% when that happens, the current surges to almost LRC anyway, which makes the soft starter pointless.

I thing that CH IT starter is the biggest POS on the market, bar none.

Thank you for your input. It is hard to get honest opinion sometimes and I appritiate yours.