My ten year old boiler needed a new control board, which arrived a couple of days after ordering it. The new board looked very slightly different than the old one but it just snapped into place and was reprogrammed in exactly the same way.
I asked the boiler repair guy about these boards and he said that they're all pretty much the same across the whole line up from this company; a control board for a ten year old boiler works in a boiler that was manufactured yesterday too. Large capacity boiler, smaller capacity boiler, new boiler, old boiler, same control board in each one. He said you just have to tell the control board which model of boiler it's installed into and that list gets longer with newer boards, which makes sense.
So, supporting older equipment can be done. Building management people probably wouldn't stand for a company saying that your otherwise good five-figures-to-replace boiler needs to entirely ripped out and replaced at great cost and downtime because of a control board that's no longer available, so the manufacturers make sure that this doesn't happen.
I don't know if this is accomplished by keeping a large supply of spare parts or by using a forward-looking design that can be adapted to newer components as the years pass, but either way it's possible. The boiler manufacturers are doing it, so it can be done.
Which raises the question why we are putting up with this sort of obsolescence with cinema equipment.
I asked the boiler repair guy about these boards and he said that they're all pretty much the same across the whole line up from this company; a control board for a ten year old boiler works in a boiler that was manufactured yesterday too. Large capacity boiler, smaller capacity boiler, new boiler, old boiler, same control board in each one. He said you just have to tell the control board which model of boiler it's installed into and that list gets longer with newer boards, which makes sense.
So, supporting older equipment can be done. Building management people probably wouldn't stand for a company saying that your otherwise good five-figures-to-replace boiler needs to entirely ripped out and replaced at great cost and downtime because of a control board that's no longer available, so the manufacturers make sure that this doesn't happen.
I don't know if this is accomplished by keeping a large supply of spare parts or by using a forward-looking design that can be adapted to newer components as the years pass, but either way it's possible. The boiler manufacturers are doing it, so it can be done.
Which raises the question why we are putting up with this sort of obsolescence with cinema equipment.
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