Trane Tracer 100 card cage upgrade

[dave2142]

Anyone familiar with upgrade of old Tracer 100 to BCU. I have a school with one Tracer 100 card cage and one Tracer 100i that is being upgraded to BCUs. This is an old system from 1993 with 32 PCM on one device and 35 on the other. I know the BCU can only handle 30 so that is a problem right away.
My big concern is time I only have 296 hours to do this and all the points on the card cage handle ice chiller so that is going to 581. All sensors are RTD so they are being replaced and 4 fan coil units and fan coil command unit being replaced. I just was wondering if anyone had done one of these upgrades and what I should expect.

[Webbyz]

I don't think that the upgrade would be that hard if all you have to do is move over the Comm to the BCU's and install a single 581.

But as you stated, the cost would be a lot because you are going to have to have 3 BCU's to take the load of the PCM's. Plus you are going to have to break the links because of the 30-device limitation. So you would have 1-30 on the first BCU / 31-60 on BCU-2 / and 61-65 on BCU #3. But you might have to reassign the addresses to make sure that you don't have two PCM's with the same addresses.

I am not sure if you have 10 or 20-point PCM's. But if you are putting in a MP-581, you might consider some EX2 modules so that if you have basic input points like Zone Temp or whatever, you might be able to drop the number of BCU's that you are going to need if your inputs form the PCM can be moved to the 581. With the 581 and 4 EX2's, you would have 36 Universal Inputs / 22 Analog Out / 22 Binary Out.

Downside is that the programming will not transfer over and someone would have to reprogram the 581 with TGP to mimic the PCM Programming.

A lot of different ways to handle it I suppose.