We used to have a turbopump that would trip the breakers every time you turned it on from cold. The pump seemingly attempted to spin up to max RPM before settling down to a more sustainable load. The only way to get the thing to stay on was to turn it on once, let it warm itself up on the initial attempt, trip the breakers, and try it another cycle now that it had some momentum and would pull slightly fewer amps. Sometimes took a few attempts to get that rolling start working.
That's a great way to lose the breaker though. If you're lucky the latch will fail. If you're unlucky it will weld shut.
Not ideal, but it was the only thing that worked. This was attached to a million dollar piece of equipment, so any remedial electrical replacement work would have been slightly inconsequential. Thankfully, it was one of those machines that you turned off as infrequently as possible, so we did not have to do this procedure too many times.
The vendor did get the hint, and the second iteration of the device did slowly warm up the pumps so this process would no longer be required.
Yes, soft start is the way to go. Also: proper industrial breakers allow for temporary overload. I have a couple of pieces of gear that have inrush currents well over the limit of a normal breaker so I put them on a slow one and now it is fine.
https://onccy.com/how-to-choose-between-type-a-b-c-and-d-min...
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Reminds me of computer fans, some bioses seem to do that ramp up for no reason thing as well.
You also want to be sure that, in the absense of fan-control, the CPU won't overheat. Full-on is safer than nothing until a driver is loaded.
not exactly relevant to computer fans, but in case of your usual standing fan you need a way larger kick to get it going. if it fails to start but stays powered it will stay stuck, heat up and fail. this is why fans usually have the highest option as the first one, so you have to start it at full speed at first, and only then reduce it.
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Fans have a minimum speed needed to spin up when cold starting from 0 RPM. So it's safer to start at near max RPM and spin down to the desired target RPM if the controller doesn't know the exact operating characteristics of each fan.
You can observe this with a speed control knob/ESP32 where a running fan will happily run forever with the knob turned down to e.g. a 30% duty cycle. But after turning to 0% and waiting for the blades to fully stop, if set back to the same 30% they won't move at all or you'll maybe hear a sketchy clicking/whine sound with the blades intermittently twitching.
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